Unfair Dismissal at Six Months: What the Employment Rights Act Changes for Hiring in 2027

There is a date in most UK employers' calendars labelled probation review. It usually sits at three months or at six, and for most of the past decade it has been a formality attended by nobody in particular. From the start of January 2027 it stops being ceremonial.

Here is the plain version, written for founders and for the people who run their hiring: what the Employment Rights Act 2025 alters, the dates attached, and what is worth doing before then. It is editorial summary rather than legal advice, and the timetable in this area has already slipped once.

The One Sentence That Matters

The law firm Lewis Silkin compresses the headline into a single line in its overview of the legislation:

"The Act reduces the qualifying period for unfair dismissal to 6 months." Lewis Silkin, on the Employment Rights Act.

The qualifying period is simply how much service somebody needs behind them before an ordinary unfair dismissal claim becomes available to them. Two years is where the UK figure sits today. The shorter period, according to the same overview, bites where the effective date of termination falls on or after 1 January 2027.

Read carefully what that does not say. Nobody has banned dismissal inside the first six months. Nobody has abolished probation. What alters is the threshold: half a year of service in, and the employer owes both a defensible reason and a defensible procedure. Plenty of smaller companies have never had to meet that bar for somebody who only arrived in the spring.

Why This Is a Hiring Date, Not Only an HR One

Work the arithmetic backwards and it lands squarely in recruitment. Anybody starting on or before 1 July 2026 crosses six months of service on or before the new rule begins. Anybody starting after that reaches the same milestone with the rule already live. In practice, then, nearly every person you hire from here onwards acquires protection while the job still feels new to them and to you.

That is the real consequence for recruitment. A hire who is not working out becomes more expensive to resolve from month seven, so failing to spot it at month three becomes more expensive too. Nothing about that is unreasonable. It simply moves the deadline for honesty forward.

Checked Against the Statute Rather Than the Commentary

Commentary on this Act has been wrong often enough that it is worth going to the source. Section 25 of the Employment Rights Act 2025 does something very plain to the Employment Rights Act 1996: in section 108, which sets the qualifying period, it substitutes "six months" for "two years", and separately omits section 124, the provision that caps the compensatory award. Two changes, not one. The second gets far less attention than it deserves.

The date is not a plan or an intention. It is already in a commencement order. The Employment Rights Act 2025 (Commencement No. 4 and Transitional and Saving Provisions) Regulations 2026, made on 26 May 2026, provide that section 25 comes into force on 1 January 2027. The same instrument contains the detail that decides real cases. The amendments have effect where an employee is dismissed before 1 January 2027 but the effective date of termination falls on or after it, and do not have effect where the effective date of termination falls before it. The trigger is the termination date, not the day the decision was taken, which is precisely the distinction a hurried December will blur.

The government's own live timetable, last updated on 25 September 2026, lists the measure under January 2027 as the reduction of the unfair dismissal qualifying period to six months, for dismissals from 1 January 2027, alongside the uncapping of compensatory awards. The same page adds that all future dates remain subject to parliamentary processes and may change, which is the honest caveat to carry over anything on it that has no month attached. Flexible working and bereavement leave sit in 2027 there with no month named at all, so treat any specific month you read elsewhere as somebody's estimate.

One wrinkle worth knowing, because you will meet it. Acas guidance updated on 1 October 2026 still describes the current two-year test and flags the coming change, but words it as not yet law. Read strictly, that is too loose: the section is enacted and the commencement order is made. The practical effect is the same, since the two-year rule governs until the new year. Where the two disagree on wording, the statute is the thing to rely on. And note what the Act does not contain: no statutory probation period and no new initial-employment regime. Probation remains a contractual device you design yourself.

The Rest of the Timetable

It is a long piece of legislation and its schedule has been shuffled more than once. Drawing on the Lewis Silkin overview alongside a separate timeline published by Employment Hero:

• Statutory sick pay reform arrived in April 2026, payable from the first day of illness.
• Parental leave from day one applies where the baby was born on or after 6 April 2026.
• Restrictions on dismissal and re-engagement shifted out of October 2026 and into January 2027.
• Changes to flexible working are anticipated in autumn 2027.
• Bereavement leave from day one is anticipated in April 2027.

Treat everything beyond the next quarter as provisional. Government timetables move, and exact commencement days are not always published in advance.

First: Pull the Real Review Forward to Month Three

A single meaningful review scheduled at the half-year mark leaves you no room at all now. Many teams do better with a brief documented check after four weeks and the serious one after twelve. That gives you real time to coach, to bend the role towards what this person turns out to be good at, or, should it come to that, to part company properly and some way short of the boundary.

Second: Agree What Good Looks Like, in Writing

Any defensible procedure begins with a target the other person can actually see. Use week one to put three or four concrete outcomes on paper, the ones you expect them to be hitting by the end of month three. None of this is paperwork for its own sake. It shields the new starter from unexplained disappointment quite as much as it shields the company, since very few people fail at work they genuinely understood. Turning a vacancy into outcomes instead of a wish list is the subject of our guide to a hiring process that survives growth.

Third: Hire With More Care, Not More Stages

The instinctive response to higher risk is to add interviews. Resist it. Additional rounds do not reliably sharpen a decision; consistency does, which is the argument in our piece on structured against unstructured interviewing. Where the work allows it, a short paid exercise tells you more than a fourth conversation. And when a hire does fail, the cause is usually a brief nobody pinned down at the start rather than an interview round somebody skipped.

Fourth: Have Someone Read Your Offer Letter

Find the offer letter and the contract you send out as standard. Is a probationary period mentioned anywhere, and is a length attached to it? Does the notice clause describe what your company would genuinely do? An hour of an employment adviser's time covers both documents, and costs a fraction of finding out during a dispute. The broader set of obligations arriving alongside this one is laid out in our employer checklist for the Act.

Who Actually Owns the Month-Three Conversation

In a company of fifteen people this duty tends to float. The founder assumes the team lead is watching, the team lead assumes the founder set the expectations, and the new starter assumes that silence means everything is fine. Three months later nobody has said anything of substance, and the only honest summary available is a vague feeling that it has not quite worked.

Name an owner for each new hire on their first day, and put the three review dates in that person's calendar before the laptop is even handed over. One named human, three diary entries. That is the whole system, and it is the difference between a documented decision you can stand behind and a conversation nobody is willing to start.

What Candidates Will Make of It

The change alters the view from the candidate's chair too. Somebody weighing a move out of three secure years somewhere else feels markedly less exposed knowing that protection arrives after six months rather than after two years. A few employers will raise it unprompted in the offer conversation, which is honest and practical and exactly the sort of plain speaking we favour. When a candidate asks about probation, they are usually asking a different question underneath: what does this company do when something goes wrong?

A Ninety-Day Shape You Can Borrow

Here is a light structure for any new starter, drawn up with the six-month boundary in view. It is a suggestion from one editorial desk, not a legal template.

• Week one. Three or four written outcomes, plus the name of whoever owes this person feedback on them.
• Day thirty. Twenty honest minutes. What has clicked, what is still opaque, what support is missing. Write it down afterwards.
• Day sixty. Hold the outcomes up against reality. Anything falling short gets named precisely, together with a description of what good would look like.
• Day ninety. The real review. Reach a joint view: thriving, needs help, or heading nowhere.
• Month five. One last look before the boundary arrives, so that nobody is ambushed by anything.

The shape is deliberately unglamorous. Written notes at each point mean that if anything later has to be explained, a record exists of what was said and when. They tend to produce gentler management as a by-product, too, because a difficulty named in week six is just a difficulty, while the identical difficulty left until month seven has become a crisis. For anyone hesitating over how to start the hard conversation, our piece on what hiring managers never see is a useful reminder of how silence reads to the person on the other side of it.

Spend the Warning on the First Ninety Days

Most companies will spend the next few months on the wrong thing. The instinct is to send the contracts to a solicitor, tighten the probation clause, and treat the whole business as a documentation exercise. An hour of advice on your offer letter is genuinely worth buying, and it is not where the value sits.

Our priority would be the stretch of time nobody owns: the ninety days after somebody walks in. The uncapping of the compensatory award is the reason. A qualifying period dropping from two years to six months changes who can bring a claim. Removing the ceiling changes what an unfair dismissal is worth, and the two together mean the cost of discovering at month eight what you could have discovered at month three has moved in a direction no clause will fix. The only reliable protection is knowing sooner, and knowing sooner is a management habit rather than a legal one.

So the spend we would argue for is unglamorous: one named owner per new starter, three written check-ins inside the first quarter, and outcomes agreed in week one that the person can actually see. Teams that skip this usually discover that nobody wrote anything down, and that the only account of a difficult first six months is a feeling nobody is willing to put in a sentence. Our onboarding checklist for the first ninety days is the version of this we would hand to a founder.

Could we be wrong? The date could move, as dates in this Act have moved before, and the government's own page says as much. That is the circumstance in which our advice would look premature, and it would still be the right advice. An employer who learns to have an honest conversation at month three is better off whether the qualifying period is six months, two years or anything in between. All of the above describes the United Kingdom, and all of it is an editor's reading rather than legal advice.

Where to Take Advice

Before any dismissal, and before you change a contract, talk to an employment solicitor, to Acas or to whoever advises you on HR. The rules governing reasons, procedure and compensation run deep, they apply to the UK specifically, and the fine print of the Act may yet move again before January arrives.

The calendar is not going to wait, and it has handed you a few months of warning. The most useful place to spend that warning is on the stretch of hiring everyone neglects, which is the three months after a new person walks in.