Ask a UK practice owner what is on their compliance radar for the rest of 2026 and you will hear about quarterly updates, agent account security and Companies House reform. Almost nobody names employment law. Yet the Employment Rights Act 2025, which received Royal Assent on the 18th of December 2025, is being rolled out in phases through 2026 and 2027, and several of those phases have already taken effect.
This matters to accountants for a simple reason. You may not give employment law advice, but you almost certainly hold the data that proves compliance. Statutory sick pay, holiday pay, hours worked, shift patterns, start dates and leavers all sit in the payroll records your practice maintains. When enforcement tightens, the first place anyone looks is the payroll file.
Several measures are live, and many clients will not have noticed them:
The holiday pay record-keeping duty and the SSP change are the two that touch practices most directly. Both are quiet on the day they arrive and expensive if a client cannot evidence compliance two years later.
Two deadlines are close enough to warrant a client email this month.
From the 1st of October 2026, the time limit for bringing most employment tribunal claims doubles from three months to six months. In practical terms, that means a longer window in which a disgruntled leaver can bring a claim, and a longer period over which your client needs to be able to produce clean records of pay, hours and process.
From the 30th of October 2026, employers face an obligation not to permit harassment of their employees by third parties, sitting alongside the strengthened duty to take all reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment. The same month brings tighter rules on tipping, a duty to inform workers of their right to join a trade union, and strengthened union access rights. Hospitality clients in particular will be affected by more than one of these at once.
From the 1st of January 2027, the qualifying period for ordinary unfair dismissal falls from two years to six months, and the statutory cap on compensatory awards is removed. Dismissal and rehire on worse terms becomes automatically unfair in most cases.
Here is the detail that catches employers out. The six month qualifying period applies to people already in employment on the 1st of January 2027, which means employees hired from around the end of June 2026 will already have reached six months of service by that date. In other words, the clock has been running since the summer. Any client who has recruited in the last few months has staff who will gain full unfair dismissal protection the moment the new rules commence.
Removing the compensation cap, currently the lower of a year's pay or roughly £118,000, changes the risk profile of a badly handled dismissal from a manageable number to an open ended one. Clients who have relied on the two year window as an informal probation policy need to hear this from someone, and you are usually the adviser they speak to most often.
Further measures are scheduled for 2027 and will require system changes rather than policy tweaks:
Guaranteed hours is the one to watch commercially. Offering the right hours to the right worker depends on tracking actual hours across a reference period. That is a data problem before it is a legal problem, and data problems are yours.
There is an opportunity here, not just an obligation. Most small employers have no HR function and no employment adviser. They have an accountant. A one hour workforce cost review that models the effect of higher SSP take up, guaranteed hours and longer tribunal exposure on a client's 2027 budget is genuinely valuable work, and it is work that only makes sense if someone has the payroll data to hand.
Firms that treat the Employment Rights Act as somebody else's problem will hear about it from clients in January. Firms that treat it as a planning conversation will have that conversation in October, on their own terms, and charge for it.
Every phase of this Act increases the value of complete, retrievable records and a clear audit trail of what was advised and when. That is true of payroll data, and it is equally true of the client communications, engagement terms and internal notes that sit around it. Practices that keep client records, tasks and correspondence in one place will find these deadlines routine. Practices relying on memory and inbox archaeology will not.
The tax deadlines will keep coming. This one is not a tax deadline, and that is exactly why it is worth an hour of your firm's attention this month.