Guaranteed hours: what the reform actually does

What the law actually says

Section 1 of the Act inserts a new Chapter 2, "Right to guaranteed hours", into the Employment Rights Act 1996. The mechanism is settled even though the numbers are not:

• The duty (s.27BA). An employer must make a guaranteed hours offer to a qualifying worker after the end of every reference period in which they qualify.
• The worker decides (s.27BE). The worker "may, by giving notice to the employer before the end of the response period, accept or reject the offer". Rejecting it changes nothing about their existing arrangement.
• Exceptions (s.27BD). The duty falls away, and an offer is treated as withdrawn, where the contract or arrangement genuinely ends during the reference, offer or response period.
• Agency workers are covered separately, under Schedule A1.

So the popular shorthand - "the end of zero-hours contracts" - is wrong twice over. The contract type survives, and the worker keeps the choice. What ends is the position where someone works settled hours for months and has no way of having that reflected in their contract.

You cannot use the offer to worsen other terms

This is the part that gets missed, and it is the anti-abuse mechanism in the whole scheme. An offer can take one of two forms, and both are constrained:

In plain terms: you cannot answer the duty by offering someone guaranteed hours at a lower rate, with worse holiday, or on a fixed term designed to expire. The offer has to be the same job with hours attached.

What is still unknown

Three things, and they are the ones everybody actually wants:

• How long is a reference period? The Act says "a specified" period - twelve weeks is the figure most commonly discussed, but it is not in the legislation.
• How few hours count as "low hours"? The test turns on the worker being available for no more than "a specified number of hours". That number does not exist yet.
• What regularity is required? The hours actually worked must satisfy conditions "as to number, regularity or otherwise as are specified".

All three come from regulations that have not been made. The government's implementation consultation, Ending one-sided flexibility, closes on 25 August 2026, and the regulations follow the response. Be sceptical of any page quoting you a definite reference period today - it is not in the Act, and nobody has it.

The companion rights

Guaranteed hours is one of a package aimed at the same problem, and the other two matter just as much operationally:

• Reasonable notice of shifts (s.2) - a right to be given reasonable notice of a shift, rather than finding out the night before.
• Payment for cancelled, moved and curtailed shifts (s.3) - where a shift is cancelled or cut at short notice, the worker is entitled to a payment. This is the one with the most direct cost, because it prices in late changes that are currently free to make.
• Exclusivity terms (s.8) - further restriction on terms preventing zero-hours workers from working elsewhere.

The Act also repeals the Workers (Predictable Terms and Conditions) Act 2023 - a right-to-request scheme that was passed but never commenced. It has been replaced with a duty on the employer rather than a request from the worker, which is a much bigger shift than it sounds: the burden moves from the person with least leverage to the person with the rota.

If you set rotas, the notice and cancellation rights will bite before anything else. Our guide to rota change notice covers what the law requires today, which is currently very little.

What to do before it commences

1. Find out who would qualify. Look at your genuinely variable-hours people and ask how many have worked broadly settled hours for the last three months. On most rotas the answer is more than expected - and those are the people who will generate offers.
2. Check whether the hours are actually variable. Plenty of "zero-hours" staff have worked the same three shifts a week for two years. That is a fixed pattern with extra paperwork, and it can be regularised now, on your terms, rather than under a statutory duty later.
3. Get shift data you can trust. The duty is calculated from hours actually worked over a reference period. If that lives in a spreadsheet or a manager's memory, the compliance problem is a record-keeping problem first.
4. Look at how late you change shifts. Once cancellations carry a payment, habitual short-notice changes become a line in the budget.
5. Do not pre-emptively cut people's hours to keep them under a threshold nobody has published yet. The threshold is unknown, the anti-avoidance provisions are not, and it is a poor look in a tribunal.

Does this apply to small employers?

Yes. There is no small-employer exemption in the Act, which is a real difference from gender pay gap reporting or collective consultation, where thresholds keep smaller businesses out. If you use variable-hours staff at all, this will apply to you - and hospitality, retail and care, where the smallest employers cluster, are exactly where it will land hardest.

General guidance, not legal advice, and this area will change when regulations are made. Verified against the Employment Rights Act 2025 s.1 as enacted, on 9 August 2026. We will update this page when the reference period and hours threshold are set - check the date above before relying on it.