The Employment Rights Act received Royal Assent back in December, and it’s easy to have mentally filed its zero-hours contract reforms under “future problem.” The government’s current consultation — “Make Work Pay: ending one-sided flexibility” — is very much a present one. It’s deciding the practical detail of how the new rules will actually work, and it closes at 11:59pm on 25 August 2026. For any UK business that uses zero-hours or low-hours staff, this is the window where the specifics are still being decided, not just announced.
What’s actually changing
The headline reform is a new duty on employers to offer zero-hours and qualifying low-hours workers a guaranteed-hours contract that reflects the hours they’ve actually been working over a reference period. The consultation is asking exactly where that threshold for a “low hours” contract should sit — the options on the table range from 8 to 48 hours a week, with the government’s own stated preference sitting between 8 and 20. It’s also consulting on the notice period required for shift changes and cancellations. None of this takes legal effect until 2027, under the Act’s staged implementation timetable, but the shape of the final rules is being set in the responses landing between now and late August.
For businesses in retail, hospitality, care, logistics or anywhere else that leans on flexible staffing, that threshold decision has real consequences. An 8-hour floor catches a very different set of workers than a 20-hour one, and the difference changes how much of your current workforce ends up with a statutory right to guaranteed hours.
Why “it’s not until 2027” is the wrong read
Treating this as next year’s problem misses two things. First, the consultation response genuinely can be shaped by employer input, particularly on where the threshold and notice-period rules land — but only if businesses engage while it’s still open, not after the rules are fixed. Second, the operational lift of complying — working out reference periods, redesigning rota and shift-notice processes, updating contracts and staff handbooks — is not a quick job for most SMEs, and starting it in early 2027 leaves very little runway before enforcement begins.
A practical first step is auditing how many of your current staff would fall inside a low-hours threshold under each of the proposed bands, so you know roughly what you’re planning for regardless of where the final number lands. It’s also worth reviewing your existing contracts and staff handbook now — reforms like this usually mean template contracts need updating, and getting that groundwork done early, rather than in a scramble once the regulations are finalised, is far less disruptive. Smallprint offers exactly this kind of ready-to-adapt legal document template, which can make updating contracts and policies for a regulatory change like this considerably less painful than starting from scratch.
What to do this month
If zero-hours or low-hours staff are a meaningful part of how you operate, don’t wait for the 2027 deadline to start paying attention. Read the consultation document, work out where your business would sit under the proposed thresholds, and consider whether a response — directly or through a trade body — is worth submitting before 25 August. Separately, begin the unglamorous work of reviewing your contracts and shift-notice processes now, so that whichever threshold the government lands on, you’re adapting an existing plan rather than building one from nothing under time pressure.
The takeaway
The zero-hours reforms are a 2027 problem with a 2026 decision point. The consultation shaping the detail closes in August, and the businesses that come out of this smoothly will be the ones that started reviewing their contracts and rota processes now, not the ones that wait for the final regulations to force their hand.
