What the Employment Rights Act actually means for cleaning contractors

The Employment Rights Act received Royal Assent on 18 December 2025, and the government is rolling it out in stages across 2026 and 2027. That staging matters, because much of it doesn't land all at once. Some parts already have confirmed dates attached, whilst others are still being worked out in secondary regulations that haven't been published yet. If you run a cleaning business, this isn't one of the bits of legislation you can safely skim past, because it was written with exactly the kind of workforce cleaning relies on in mind: shift-based, often zero-hours, and high turnover.

The part that matters most is the right to guaranteed hours.

Under the Act, a worker on a zero-hours or low-hours contract can qualify for a guaranteed-hours offer once they've worked a 12-week reference period. That offer must reflect what they actually worked during that period (not a rough estimate), and it must specify the days and times, or the working pattern, the employer is committing to. So, if someone's been consistently doing three eight-hour shifts a week for three months, the employer is expected to formalise that as their contract rather than keep them on a zero-hours arrangement indefinitely.

There's a detail in how this gets triggered that's easy to miss.

The 12-week reference period counts backward from whenever the guaranteed-hours duty actually comes into force, which several employment advisers now put at 2027 rather than 2026. On the surface, that sounds like a year of breathing room, but it really isn’t, because the clock that decides what each worker is owed starts counting the hours they're already working now. A business that waits until the deadline to think about this will be trying to reconstruct months of shift history retrospectively, from whatever records happen to exist. Whereas those that start tracking properly this year will have the reference period it'll need when the duty lands.

The bigger problem

To make a guaranteed-hours offer correctly, an employer needs accurate, worker-by-worker records of hours actually worked, not hours on a rota or intended hours. They need a record of what actually happened, on which days, at which sites. Employment advisers working across sectors on this have been blunt about where most small and medium employers currently stand: most don't have clear weekly records of hours worked per worker, which is exactly what the guaranteed-hours calculation depends on. For a cleaning contractor with staff spread across a dozen sites, covering shifts for each other and working variable hours noted on paper sheets or texted to a supervisor, that difference is likely wider than in most other sectors.

What getting ahead of this actually looks like

Employers are being advised to audit their workforce now, to work out how many people are on zero or low hours contracts and what their real working patterns have looked like over recent months, and to make sure they have an adequate way of recording hours going forward, whether that's an electronic door card system, a clocking-in system, or something else that captures time worked as it happens rather than as it's remembered later. It's the same basic discipline good payroll practice has always needed, but what's changed is that it's no longer just good practice. It's what a guaranteed-hours calculation, and potentially a Fair Work Agency inspection, will be checked against.

The Act also introduces requirements around shift notice.

Employers will need to give workers reasonable notice before a shift, and may owe compensation if a shift is cancelled or cut short without enough warning. For an industry that has traditionally leaned on last-minute cover and flexible call-ins to absorb sickness and one-off requests, that's a genuine operational change. It changes how much slack a rota can absorb before it starts creating financial exposure rather than just an administrative issue.

Fair Work Agency

The Act also establishes a new enforcement body, the Fair Work Agency, bringing several existing enforcement functions together under one roof. How proactively it inspects individual cleaning contracts in practice is still an open question. But its creation is a signal in itself: enforcement of hours and pay records is being treated as a genuine priority this time, not left to whichever agency happened to have jurisdiction before.

Other dates to note

A few other dates are worth having on the radar too. Protections against detriment for taking industrial action, along with new rules around union facilities and equality representatives, are set to come into force on 30 October 2026. An extension of blacklisting protections is expected sometime in 2027. Not every provision in the Act touches day-to-day cleaning operations directly, but the ones around hours, notice, and record-keeping do, squarely.

Cost pressures to consider

The National Living Wage rose to £12.71 an hour on 1 April 2026, a 4.1% increase, and wages are already the largest single cost line in most cleaning contracts. None of that is new information to anyone running one, but it's the backdrop the Employment Rights Act is landing on: rising wage costs, plus a new administrative and legal obligation that depends on data most businesses haven't historically needed to keep in this level of detail.

Response Period

The "response period," the window a worker has to accept or decline a guaranteed-hours offer, hasn't been defined in the regulations published so far. Further detail is expected as secondary legislation catches up with the Act itself, and some of what's being reported now may change before it's finalised. Anyone making operational decisions off the back of this should keep checking official guidance as it's published, rather than treating any single article, including this one, as the last word.

What's already clear is the direction of travel - cleaning contracts are moving from an assumption of flexibility toward an expectation of accuracy, and the businesses least exposed when the guaranteed-hours duty lands will be the ones that already know, precisely, who worked where and when, rather than the ones trying to piece it together after the fact once the regulator starts asking.