The Employment Rights Act and shift work
The Employment Rights Act 2025 received Royal Assent on 18 December 2025. It is chapter 36. Parts of it will matter to people who work shifts. The mistake is to treat the whole Act as if every duty started that day.
What the Act contains, and what has started
The Act provides for guaranteed hours, for reasonable notice of a shift, and for payment when a shift is cancelled, moved or cut short. Those are the provisions people mean when they say zero-hours contracts are being rewritten. GOV.UK’s implementation timeline has said those shift duties take effect in 2027, and that the timings are updated as consultation finishes. Consultation is how the detail, including any notice figure, gets set. This page will not invent a number of days or a cancellation rate. There is not a commenced figure to copy onto a rota.
The first commencement regulations, SI 2026/3, brought regulation-making and consultation powers into force in January 2026. They did not switch on the duties themselves. A power to write a rule is not the rule. Until a commencement date is set and the regulations exist, you cannot comply with a notice period that has not been specified, and you should not tell a worker that a cancelled shift already carries a statutory payment of a particular size.
What already applies
Zero-hours workers already have holiday, rest and sick pay. An exclusivity clause is already unenforceable. The 48-hour average, the opt-out for adults, the tighter limits for young workers, and the night-work rules are already in the Working Time Regulations. Statutory holiday is already 5.6 weeks, with 12.07% accrual for irregular-hours and part-year workers in leave years from 1 April 2024. Rolled-up holiday pay is already limited to those workers. None of that is waiting for 2027.
SSP for a spell in the 2026/27 tax year is already payable from the first full day, at the lower of £123.25 and 80% of average weekly earnings. That change is separate from the Employment Rights Act’s shift duties. Do not bundle them into one “everything changed in April” sentence.
How to read a rota in the meantime
Publish the week with enough notice that people can plan, because that is decent management and because a late change is already a practical problem. Do not label that habit as the statutory notice period. Keep cancelled shifts out of the timesheet if they were not worked, so the hours you download are hours that happened. When the duties are commenced, the zero-hours guide is the page we will have to revise. Until then it says, on purpose, that those duties are not in force yet.
This is not legal advice. The Act’s text is on legislation.gov.uk. The dates that matter are the commencement dates, not the date of Royal Assent.