Zero-hours contract rights under the 2025/26 reforms

Updated August 6, 2026

Three separate rights are landing for people on zero-hours and low-hours contracts, built into the Employment Rights Act 2025: a right to guaranteed hours that reflect what you've actually been working, a right to reasonable notice of your shifts, and a right to compensation when a shift is cancelled or cut short at the last minute.

What the reforms are trying to fix

If you're on a zero-hours or low-hours contract, you'll know the pattern. Some weeks you're offered plenty of shifts. Other weeks almost nothing, with no real explanation. Shifts get added or pulled at short notice, and there's rarely any compensation when that happens, even if you'd already turned down other work or arranged childcare around it.

The Employment Rights Act 2025 sets out to change that, though not all at once. Provisions are commencing on staggered dates rather than in one go, and the detail for zero-hours rights specifically is still being filled in through secondary legislation. Our timeline of the Employment Rights Act 2026 changes tracks what's actually in force as dates get confirmed, which is worth checking before you rely on anything below as settled.

The right to guaranteed hours

The core idea is straightforward. If you regularly work more hours than your contract says, over a set reference period, you should be offered hours that reflect that reality rather than staying nominally on zero hours forever. What counts as "regularly," how long the reference period runs, and how the offer of guaranteed hours actually works in practice are all details due to be set out in regulations. We're not going to guess at a specific number of weeks here, because it hasn't been confirmed, and guessing wrong would do you no favours.

Whether you'll be able to decline a guaranteed-hours offer and stay on your existing flexible arrangement is also still being worked out. If flexibility suits you better than fixed hours, that's a fair thing to want, but don't take anyone's confident-sounding claim about how it'll work as final until it's on gov.uk.

Reasonable notice of shifts

Separately from guaranteed hours, the reforms introduce a right to reasonable notice of when you're expected to work a shift, and reasonable notice if a shift you've already been given is changed. What "reasonable" means will depend on the job and the circumstances, which is fairly normal for employment law drafting. It isn't yet clear whether a fixed minimum notice period (a set number of days, for example) will be specified, so treat any number you see quoted elsewhere with caution until it's confirmed.

Getting paid when a shift falls through

The third strand is compensation. If your employer cancels a shift, moves it, or cuts it short without giving you reasonable notice, you're due to gain a right to payment for that. How the payment is calculated, whether it's the full shift, a proportion, or something else, hasn't been finalised in a way we're confident stating here. This is genuinely one to watch rather than one to plan around yet.

Where this connects to unfair dismissal and tribunal claims

Zero-hours and low-hours work often means short, intermittent engagements, which historically made it harder to build up the service needed to bring an unfair dismissal claim. That's shifting too. The qualifying period for unfair dismissal is being reduced from two years to six months (the government moved away from the originally proposed day-one right), though the exact commencement date is another one we'd rather flag as unconfirmed than state wrongly.

If a dispute over guaranteed hours, shift notice, or cancelled shifts ever tips into something you're dismissed or penalised for, the clock for bringing an employment tribunal claim starts running from the date that happened, known as the effective date of termination for dismissals. Since 1 October 2026, that clock generally runs for six months less a day rather than the old three months less a day, though the longer limit only applies where the act complained of falls on or after that date, and you still have to go through Acas early conciliation first. Our employment tribunal deadline calculator works out which regime applies to your dates and accounts for how contacting Acas pauses the clock.

What to do in the meantime

Keep a record of the shifts you're offered, worked, and cancelled, along with any notice you were given. It's useful evidence whether you're negotiating informally with your employer now or relying on the reference period once guaranteed hours rights are actually in force. Don't assume a specific figure you've seen quoted online, a number of weeks for the reference period, a number of days for notice, is accurate; the regulations that will fix those numbers haven't all landed yet.

Because so much of this is still moving, it's worth checking back against our dated rundown of the Employment Rights Act 2026 changes as commencement dates for guaranteed hours, shift notice, and cancellation pay are confirmed, since that's where the practical detail you'll actually need will show up first.