Reasonable Notice of Shifts, and What Cancelling One Will Cost You

If you run a pub, a restaurant or a cafe, you have probably cancelled a shift on the morning of a quiet Tuesday and thought nothing more about it. Right now that costs you nothing. It is not going to stay that way.

The Employment Rights Act 2025 gives people on zero-hours and low-hours contracts a right to reasonable notice of their shifts, and a payment when a shift is cancelled, moved or cut short at short notice. It is the companion to the guaranteed hours duty, which we covered in what your rota needs to show before 2027. Guaranteed hours changes who you employ and on what terms. This one changes what a last minute rota change costs you, in cash, every time you make one.

This is general guidance and not legal advice. The detail sits in regulations that are not finished, so treat everything below as a proposal rather than the law. For anything specific to your venue, speak to ACAS or an employment solicitor.

Where this actually stands

The Act is passed. The numbers are not. The thresholds, the notice periods and the size of the payments all arrive through secondary legislation, and the government consulted on them between 2 June and 25 August 2026 in a consultation called "Make Work Pay: ending one-sided flexibility". The rights are expected to take effect in 2027, with no confirmed date.

Nobody can tell you what a cancelled shift will cost in 2027. What you can do is understand the shape of it, because the shape is settled even where the figures are not.

What reasonable notice might mean

The Act does not define reasonable. The consultation put the range for directly engaged workers at somewhere between one and four weeks. Agency workers are being handled separately, with options of five days or less, and possible exemptions for some hirers such as those providing care to vulnerable people.

Not everyone is in scope. The right is aimed at workers whose guaranteed hours sit below a threshold. The consultation explored anywhere from 8 to 48 hours a week, with the government indicating a preference for somewhere between 8 and 20. In a typical venue that captures your casual bar staff and your weekend kitchen porters, and probably not your head chef.

If your rota currently goes out on a Thursday for the week starting Monday, that is three days of notice. Under the mildest version of these proposals it is short. Under the strictest it is a long way short.

What a cancelled shift might cost

Three moving parts, none of them fixed yet.

What counts as short notice. The consultation considered anything from one to seven days, with seven days being the maximum the Act allows. A separate, higher tier for very short notice is also being considered, so cancelling on the day would cost more than cancelling on Friday for Tuesday.

How much you pay. The consultation floated a percentage between 10 and 80 per cent, calculated on either the worker's expected earnings for that shift or the National Living Wage.

When you are let off. Exceptions are being considered for events genuinely outside your control, such as extreme weather or a power cut, most likely with a requirement to give the worker a written explanation.

The government's own impact work puts the annual cost to business somewhere between 20 million and 1.3 billion pounds, which is less a forecast than an admission of how much the final percentage matters.

One week, priced twice

The figures below are an illustration, not data from a real venue. The assumptions are written out so you can swap in your own.

Assume one casual bar worker aged 21 or over, paid the National Living Wage of 12.71 pounds an hour, which is the rate from 1 April 2026. Assume they are below whatever hours threshold ends up applying. In one week you make three normal, unremarkable changes:

• Tuesday, an 8 hour shift cancelled at 10am the same morning because the forecast is bad. Value of the shift: 101.68 pounds.
• Thursday, sent home 3 hours early because it is dead after 9pm. Value of the lost hours: 38.13 pounds.
• Saturday, start moved from 5pm to 7pm, told on Thursday, losing 2 hours. Value of the lost hours: 25.42 pounds.

Under today's rules, the worker is paid for the hours worked and nothing else. The three changes cost you nothing.

Under the proposals, the same week attracts a payment. At the bottom of the consulted range, 10 per cent, that is 16.52 pounds. At the top, 80 per cent, it is 132.18 pounds. Somewhere in the middle, at 50 per cent, it is 82.62 pounds.

Two caveats. The percentage is not chosen, so the honest answer is a range and not a number. And it is not settled whether a moved shift attracts payment on the whole shift or only on the hours lost, which for a Saturday night could be the difference between 25 pounds and 100.

So do not build a budget on this. The number that matters is the one above multiplied by however many casual staff you do this to, across however many weeks of the year, and most operators do not know their own count. That is the actual problem.

What this does to how you run a rota

Two things stop being informal.

Notice becomes a date you have to be able to evidence. If a worker says they were told on Friday and you say Wednesday, the record decides it. A rota posted in a group chat, edited by three managers, with the original message deleted, is not a record. This is one of several reasons WhatsApp is an expensive way to run a kitchen.

Changes become an expense line. At the moment a cancellation is a favour you ask. Afterwards it is a purchase you make. That is worth tracking the way you track any other cost, and it sits alongside the less visible costs of poor scheduling you are already paying without seeing them.

Four things worth doing before 2027

Find out how often you actually change shifts. Cancellations, curtailments and moved starts, over the last three months. If you cannot answer that from your records, that is the first thing to fix, not the law.

Publish the rota earlier. Moving from a few days to a fortnight removes most of your exposure to the strictest version of these rules, and staff notice it immediately.

Collect availability properly. Most short notice changes are corrections to a rota built on guesswork. Getting your team to set their availability removes a good share of them before they happen.

Write down why. When you do cancel, record the reason. If an exceptions regime arrives for weather and power cuts, you will need the note, and if it does not, you will still want to know which of your cancellations were avoidable.

None of that depends on which percentage the government picks. The preparation is the same under every version of the rules, which is the useful thing about starting now rather than in 2027.

Where Batch fits

Batch timestamps every rota publication and every change to it, so when a shift moves you have the date it moved and who was told, without anyone having to remember. Short notice changes are flagged as they happen and counted, which turns the question of what this will cost you into a report rather than a guess. Working-time checks run in the same pass. It is 10 pounds per venue per month plus VAT, or 100 pounds a year, unlimited staff, and free for 30 days with no card needed.