Guaranteed Hours Are Coming: What Your Rota Needs to Show Before 2027

Something is about to change in how UK venues use casual staff, and the useful thing to understand early is that the preparation is not legal work. It is rota work, and it starts before the rules do.

The Employment Rights Act 2025 gives people on zero-hours and low-hours contracts three new rights: a guaranteed hours contract reflecting the hours they have actually been working, reasonable notice of their shifts, and a payment when a shift is cancelled, moved or cut short at short notice. Hospitality is the sector this lands on hardest.

This is general guidance, not legal advice. The detail sits in regulations that are not final, so treat the numbers below as the proposals on the table rather than the law. For anything specific to your venue, check with ACAS or an employment solicitor.

Where this actually stands

The Act is passed. What it does not yet contain is the detail: the thresholds, the reference period, the notice periods, the size of the payments. All of that arrives through secondary legislation, and the government consulted on it between 2 June and 25 August 2026.

The rights are expected to take effect in 2027, in phases. Nobody can give you an exact date yet, and anyone who does is guessing.

The three rights, in plain English

Guaranteed hours. If someone on a zero-hours or low-hours contract consistently works more than their contract says over a reference period, you have to offer them a contract that reflects the hours they actually worked. You have to make the offer. They do not have to take it, and plenty of people will prefer to stay flexible.

Reasonable notice of shifts. Staff get a right to reasonable notice of a shift, and of any change or cancellation to one. The Act does not define reasonable. The consultation floated somewhere between one and four weeks.

Payment for short notice changes. If you cancel, move or shorten a shift at short notice, the worker is owed a payment. The consultation suggested short notice means inside seven days, and put the payment somewhere between 10 and 80 per cent of what the shift would have paid, with more owed the later the change comes.

Who it will apply to

The duty is aimed at people on zero-hours contracts, and on low-hours contracts where the guaranteed hours sit below a threshold. The consultation put that threshold anywhere from 8 to 48 hours a week, with the government leaning towards 8 to 20.

An exception for genuinely seasonal work and short-term cover is expected, though where exactly that line falls is one of the things still being decided.

If that sounds like most of your casual team, it probably is. A student who does two shifts a week in term time and five over the summer is exactly the case this was written for.

The reference period is the whole game

Here is the part that catches people out.

The offer you have to make is not based on what you meant to give someone. It is based on what your rota actually gave them, over a defined stretch of time. The government proposed twelve weeks, with 26 and 52 weeks also on the table.

Which means the answer to "who will qualify" is already sitting in your rota history. Not in your contracts. In your rota.

If you cannot currently look back over the last twelve weeks and say how many hours each casual member of staff actually worked, you have a data problem before you have a legal one. That is an easy thing to fix now and an awkward thing to fix in a hurry.

Four things worth doing before the rules land

Know your numbers. Take your casual staff and look at the last twelve weeks. How many hours did each of them actually work, and how does that compare to their contract? That one exercise tells you roughly how much of your team the guaranteed hours duty will touch.

Keep the history somewhere you can query. A rota that lives in a group chat leaves you nothing to look back at. Whatever you use, it needs to still be readable in a year, which is one more reason the group chat is a bad filing cabinet.

Publish further ahead. If reasonable notice settles at one to four weeks, a rota published on Friday for Monday stops being tight and starts being a liability. Moving to a fortnight is worth doing on its own merits anyway, because it is one of the few scheduling changes staff genuinely notice.

Record why shifts change. Cancellations and shortened shifts are about to have a price attached. Knowing how often you do it, and why, is the difference between a manageable cost and a nasty surprise.

What is still undecided

Quite a lot, honestly:

• the exact reference period
• the low hours threshold
• what counts as reasonable notice
• the size of the short notice payment
• how any of it works for agency workers, consulted on separately
• the commencement date

None of that is a reason to wait. Every one of those unknowns changes how much this costs you, not whether you need to know your own hours history. The preparation is identical under any version of the rules.

The part that is not bad news

Read it purely as compliance and it is a cost. Read it as an operator and it is close to a description of a venue people want to work in: hours you can rely on, a rota that arrives in decent time, and a manager who does not move your Saturday on Friday afternoon.

Those are the same things that keep good staff, which is the more expensive problem most venues already have.

Where Batch fits

Batch keeps a full shift history for every person, records contract type and guaranteed weekly hours, and flags short notice changes as they happen, so the twelve week question is a report rather than an archaeology project. Working-time checks run on every rota as it builds, in the same way.

Ten pounds a month per venue plus VAT, unlimited staff, and free for 30 days with no card.