The Employment Rights Act: what has commenced, what has not, and what it means for tribunal claims

A statute that arrives in phases

The Employment Rights Act 2025 received Royal Assent on 18 December 2025 and stands on the statute book as chapter 36 of that year. It is the legislative core of the government’s Plan to Make Work Pay, and it touches almost every corner of individual employment law: dismissal, sick pay, family leave, harassment, trade union rights, labour-market enforcement and tribunal time limits.

What it is not is self-executing. A small number of provisions took effect at Royal Assent or shortly afterwards, but most of the Act waits on commencement regulations, and the government has committed to delivering the programme in phases across a two-year period, using the common commencement dates of 6 April and 1 October. Many of the headline measures also depend on further secondary legislation, and on consultations about the detail, before they bite.

The Department for Business and Trade maintains a public timeline of the changes, last updated on 25 August 2026, and it is candid about its own status: future dates remain subject to parliamentary processes and may change. That caveat is not boilerplate. It is the single most important discipline for anyone planning around the Act: a date on the timeline is a statement of intention until commencement regulations are made.

What is already in force

The first measures arrived quickly. The Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act 2023 was repealed at Royal Assent, and on 18 February 2026 the great majority of the Trade Union Act 2016 was repealed: dismissal for taking industrial action became automatically unfair, industrial action mandates now last twelve months rather than six, and the notice period for industrial action fell from fourteen days to ten. On 25 August 2026, electronic and workplace balloting for statutory trade union ballots took effect — the most recent commencement at the time of writing.

The first substantial wave of individual rights followed on 6 April 2026. Paternity leave and unpaid parental leave became day-one rights; statutory sick pay became payable from the first day of illness, with the lower earnings limit removed; the maximum protective award for failing to consult on collective redundancies doubled from 90 to 180 days’ pay; disclosures about sexual harassment were brought within whistleblowing protection; and employers came under a duty to keep records of annual leave. A day later, on 7 April 2026, the Fair Work Agency was established, folding the existing labour-market enforcement bodies into a single agency with a wider remit.

The machinery sits in the commencement regulations — principally the Commencement No. 1 Regulations made in January 2026 and the Commencement No. 2 Regulations made in March 2026 — which also carry the transitional rules that decide which cases the new law reaches. Those transitional rules matter as much as the commencements themselves. The doubled protective award, for example, applies only to dismissals taking effect on or after 6 April 2026; a collective redundancy that completed before that date is governed by the old 90-day maximum. The same pattern repeats at every stage of the programme, and it becomes acute in October.

The next wave: October 2026

The most significant change for claimants arrives first. From 1 October 2026, the time limit for most Employment Tribunal claims increases from three months to six. Section 152 and Schedule 12 of the Act rewrite the limitation provisions across employment legislation, including the three-month limit in the Equality Act 2010, and supporting regulations extend the change to the remaining claim types; for breach of contract claims in Scotland the change follows on 9 November 2026.

The six-month limit is not retrospective. The transitional provisions apply it only where the act complained of — the dismissal, the deduction, the discriminatory act — occurs on or after 1 October 2026; anything earlier remains governed by the three-month regime. For several months the two regimes will run side by side, and the deadline for any given claim will turn on the date of the event, not the date the claimant reads about the change.

Later in the month, on 30 October 2026, the harassment and trade union packages commence: employers must take “all reasonable steps” to prevent sexual harassment of their workers, employers become liable in principle for harassment of their staff by third parties such as customers and clients, and a further set of union measures — including the duty to inform workers of their right to join a trade union — takes effect. Acas is explicit that, in most cases, how these measures will be implemented remains subject to government consultation.

What has not commenced

The changes that attract the most attention are also the furthest away. From 1 January 2027, the qualifying period for ordinary unfair dismissal falls from two years to six months, and the statutory cap on the compensatory award is removed — both applying where the effective date of termination falls on or after that date. The government had originally proposed unfair dismissal protection from the first day of employment; the six-month qualifying period is the compromise that reached the statute book.

The same date brings the fire-and-rehire restrictions: dismissing an employee for refusing to agree a variation of certain core contractual terms becomes automatically unfair in most cases, with a narrow exception for businesses in severe financial difficulty that genuinely have no alternative.

Beyond that, a long tail of measures remains pencilled in for 2027 without fixed dates: guaranteed hours and shift-notice rights for zero-hours and low-hours workers, restrictions on non-disclosure agreements in harassment and discrimination cases, statutory bereavement leave, regulation of umbrella companies, the new collective redundancy consultation threshold, stronger dismissal protection during pregnancy and after maternity leave, and mandatory gender pay gap and menopause action plans. None of these is law yet, and the timing of several depends on consultations still in progress.

Timing a claim in the overlap

The practical consequences follow directly from the calendar. First, work to the deadline that exists on the day the act happens, not the deadline that is coming. A claimant whose employment ends in September 2026 is inside the three-month regime and stays there; planning around a six-month limit that will never apply to that dismissal is how otherwise good claims are lost.

Second, do not assume January never looks back. The test is the effective date of termination, not the day the decision is announced: where the effective date of termination falls before 1 January 2027 the two-year qualifying period still governs, so a claimant with eighteen months’ service whose employment ends in November 2026 gains nothing from the coming change. But an employee given notice in November 2026 whose notice expires on or after 1 January 2027 falls inside the new regime. The commencement calendar decides which law applies, and for dismissal it runs from the date the employment ends.

Third, build early conciliation into the timetable rather than around it. Most claimants must notify Acas before presenting a tribunal claim, and since 1 December 2025 the early conciliation period can run for up to twelve weeks — double the six weeks that applied before. A longer conciliation window is not a reason to notify late: the early conciliation certificate is the gateway to the claim form, and the deadline discipline above still applies.

Fourth, treat dates as evidence, not memory. The commencement calendar rewards the claimant who can prove when things happened: the dismissal letter and its effective date of termination, the payslip showing the deduction, the incident log behind a harassment complaint. Where a course of conduct straddles a commencement date, each act may need to be assessed separately, and the safest course is to diarise the deadline produced by the earliest act and the older regime. Evidence turns confusion into an argument; a dated chronology turns the calendar into a plan.

Finally, keep watching the timeline. The government updates it as commencement regulations are laid, and dates have moved before. A timetable checked in September is a starting point, not a guarantee.