If your café, salon, shop or venue runs on zero hours or low hours staff, the Employment Rights Act 2025 is heading your way. In 2027, three connected rights arrive for zero hours and low hours workers (Acas: Employment Rights Act 2025):
- The right to guaranteed hours. Workers who regularly work more hours than their contract says will have the right to a contract that reflects the hours they actually work, if they want it.
- Compensation for cancelled shifts. If you cancel, move or cut short a shift, the worker will have a right to be paid for it.
- Reasonable notice of shifts. Publishing the rota the night before stops being a business habit and becomes a legal problem.
The mindset shift
None of this bans zero hours contracts. What it does is end the version of zero hours where all the flexibility belongs to the employer and all the uncertainty belongs to the worker. If your flexible staffing genuinely is flexible (students who want variable shifts, seasonal peaks, genuine cover work), the model survives. If "zero hours" has quietly become "Sam works every Tuesday to Saturday but we keep them on zero hours anyway", the law is coming for exactly that gap, and Sam will have the right to a contract that says what reality says.
What to do this year (before you have to)
1. Audit the gap between contracts and reality. Pull three months of rotas. For each zero hours worker, compare contracted hours with actual hours. Where someone has worked a steady pattern for months, you have found your exposure. That is who guaranteed hours rights are designed for.
2. Move your regulars onto honest contracts. If someone reliably works 20 hours a week, a part time or minimum hours contract costs you little now and earns goodwill, rather than being forced on you awkwardly in 2027. Keep genuine zero hours arrangements for genuinely variable work.
3. Fix your rota discipline. Publish rotas further ahead, and treat late cancellations as what they are about to become: a cost. Building the habit now means the 2027 rules arrive as a non event.
4. Get the contract itself right. A zero hours contract still needs to be a proper contract: status, pay, holiday accrual, notice, and no unenforceable exclusivity clauses (those have been banned for years, yet still turn up in downloaded templates). This is also a good moment to mention that a written statement of main terms is a day one legal right. If your flexible staff have nothing in writing, that is your first fix, today, not in 2027.
The honest trade off
These changes will add admin and some cost for businesses that rely on last minute staffing. But they also reward the employers who get organised early: predictable rotas reduce no shows, honest contracts reduce turnover, and "we're ahead of the law" is a genuinely useful line when you are competing for good staff in hospitality and retail.
Our Growth Bundle includes a professionally drafted Zero Hours Contract for England and Wales, written to be fair, enforceable and ready for what is coming, alongside the fixed term contract and absence documents most businesses with flexible staffing need. Start with the free HR Risk Checklist if you want to see all your gaps at once.
Guidance for employers in England and Wales, not legal advice. The detailed rules on guaranteed hours, notice periods and cancellation pay are subject to government consultation. We will update our templates as they are confirmed.