UK employment compliance in 2026

1. Audit your contracts against the April 2026 changes

   Check every UK employment contract against the five ERA 2025 changes in force from 6 April 2026: day-one paternity leave, day-one unpaid parental leave, day-one SSP with no waiting days and no lower earnings limit, the new statutory family-leave pay rate, and the doubled collective redundancy protective award. Any contract referencing the old qualifying periods is out of date.

2. Update your Statutory Sick Pay process

   Remove any waiting-day or lower-earnings-limit check from your SSP workflow. SSP is now payable from the first day of sickness for every employee, regardless of earnings. Payroll must reflect the current weekly rate.

3. Verify discrimination and whistleblowing procedures cover day one

   Equality Act 2010 protections and Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998 whistleblowing rights apply from day one, with no qualifying period and no compensation cap. Confirm your HR procedures and onboarding documentation are auditable against all nine protected characteristics from the offer-letter stage.

4. Strengthen probation reviews ahead of January 2027

   From January 2027 the unfair-dismissal qualifying period drops from two years to six months. Start substantive performance management before the six-month mark. Rubber-stamping a probation review at month five will not be enough once the window compresses.

5. Review data protection obligations for UK employee data

   Issue a UK GDPR privacy notice at recruitment and on hire. Document the lawful basis for each processing purpose. Build in a process to answer subject access requests within one month and to report data breaches to the ICO within 72 hours. For any UK-to-US data flows, confirm standard contractual clauses or another approved safeguard is in place.

Pre-2027 reality: employees needed 24 months of continuous service to bring an unfair-dismissal claim. Most short-tenure dismissals carried no unfair-dismissal risk. Only discrimination, whistleblowing, and other protected-reason claims applied from day one.

Post-January 2027 reality: 6 months of service unlocks unfair-dismissal protection. Employers need a documented fair-procedure trail for any dismissal after the 6 months threshold. The safe window compresses from 24 months to 6 months.

What this changes operationally

• Probation reviews must be substantive. Rubber-stamping at month 5 is not enough.
• Performance management starts earlier. Capability concerns need formal handling before month 6, not after.
• Settlement agreements become more common. Quick exits with finality replace contested dismissals.
• Probation extensions become more common. A six-month probation extended to 9 or 12 months where performance is unclear.

Note on the compensation cap: the Employment Rights Act 2025 also removes the unfair-dismissal compensatory cap of £123,543 from 1 January 2027 onwards.

Section 28 of the Employment Rights Act 2025 makes it automatically unfair to dismiss an employee because they refuse a restricted variation of pay, pensions, hours, or holiday entitlement, or to dismiss and replace or re-engage them, including via a new hire doing substantially the same work, to achieve that varied term another way. As of mid-2026, only the power to make the implementing regulations that define a restricted variation in detail has been brought into force; the substantive protection itself is targeted for 1 January 2027 under the government's revised roadmap, which moved the date back from an original October 2026 target to align it with the unfair-dismissal change.

A narrow exception is expected to apply where the employer can show the business faced severe financial difficulty threatening it as a going concern, the variation was unavoidable, and it was aimed specifically at addressing that difficulty.

The nine protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010:

• Age
• Disability
• Gender reassignment
• Marriage and civil partnership
• Pregnancy and maternity
• Race
• Religion or belief
• Sex
• Sexual orientation

Why discrimination claims matter more than unfair-dismissal claims

• No qualifying period. Claims apply from the job advert stage, through interview, into employment, and after termination.
• No compensation cap. Unfair dismissal is capped. Discrimination is uncapped.
• Three-month limitation window. The continuing-act doctrine extends this in practice.
• Reverse burden of proof. Once a prima facie case is established, the employer must prove a non-discriminatory reason.

Every UK HR process needs to be auditable against the nine protected characteristics. Recruitment, performance management, redundancy selection, promotion, and termination are all in scope. Teamed's standard procedures build this in.

A qualifying disclosure must:

• Be a disclosure of information, not a personal grievance
• Be in the public interest
• Relate to one of six categories: criminal offence, breach of legal obligation, miscarriage of justice, danger to health and safety, environmental damage, or deliberate concealment of any of the above
• Be made to an appropriate recipient (usually the employer, but can be a regulator or external body)

Whistleblowing claims are increasing in volume. A complaint about working time, a report about cash-in-hand pay, a concern about health and safety: all can qualify if framed as a disclosure rather than a personal grievance.

Practical implications for UK employers:

• Privacy notice. Issued at recruitment and on hire, explaining what data is processed and why.
• Lawful basis. Documented for each processing purpose. Usually contract performance or legitimate interest for employment data.
• Subject access requests (SARs). Employees can request a copy of their personal data. Free to make, and must be answered within 1 month (extendable to 3 months for complex requests).
• Data breaches. Must be reported to the ICO within 72 hours if likely to result in risk to individuals.
• International transfers. UK-to-outside-UK transfers require adequacy regulations, standard contractual clauses (SCCs), or another approved safeguard.

For US-headquartered businesses hiring through Teamed in the UK: employee data flowing from Teamed Ltd to the US parent requires SCCs or another safeguard. Teamed handles the data processing agreement.

Three frameworks worth knowing:

• Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992. Primary union law, recognition procedures, and industrial action rules.
• Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 2006 (TUPE). Protects employees when a business or service transfers between employers, including outsourcing and insourcing changes.
• Information and Consultation of Employees Regulations 2004. Applies to employers with 50 or more employees, on request from 10 percent of staff (capped at 2,500).

TUPE: the underrated risk

TUPE applies when an economic entity that retains its identity transfers between employers. This includes business sales and service-provision changes (for example, switching an outsourced service from Provider A to Provider B). Affected employees transfer with their existing terms and continuity of service.

TUPE is why switching EOR providers is not free. If you move UK employees from one EOR to Teamed, TUPE applies and Teamed inherits the existing employment terms. Most EOR-to-EOR moves are handled by mutual consent, but the legal framework is real.

Real HR and legal experts handle your UK hires, from the first offer letter through every RTI submission and year-end P60. An actual person, not a chatbot or a pooled queue. There is no setup fee and no exit fee. Employer cost passes through at cost, itemised on every invoice.

Teamed tracks ERA 2025 changes as they come into force. Day-one rights are baked into the onboarding flow. The January 2027 qualifying-period change is already in the compliance roadmap. Start from the UK hiring overview. Each child guide covers one layer of UK employment law.

Key sources: GOV.UK employing people, Employment Rights Act 2025 (legislation.gov.uk), and ACAS employment advice.