59% of variable hours workers get less than a week’s notice of their shifts. 13% get less than 24 hours. That’s not an estimate, it’s the government’s own cited figure, from Living Wage Foundation research, sitting in the same factsheet that introduces three new statutory rights meant to fix exactly this.
The rights themselves are real: guaranteed hours reflecting actual work patterns, reasonable notice of shifts, and payment when a shift is cancelled at short notice. What isn’t settled yet is how any of it actually works in practice. The government’s consultation on the detailed mechanics closed on 25 August 2026, and the regulations that will define the real thresholds haven’t been published.
This piece covers what’s actually confirmed, what’s still genuinely up for grabs, and what employers with zero-hours or low-hours workers should be doing now, before the answers land.
Explore: Employment Law Changes 2026: HR Guidance on the Employment Rights Act 2025, for the full picture this piece sits within.
The Three Rights, in Plain Terms
GOV.UK’s own factsheet sets out three connected rights for qualifying zero-hours and low-hours workers, taking effect from 2027:
- A right to guaranteed hours, reflecting the hours a worker actually works over a reference period, not a fixed number set once and forgotten
- A right to reasonable notice of shifts, and of any changes to shifts already scheduled
- A right to payment when a shift is cancelled, moved, or cut short at short notice
None of this removes the option of a zero-hours arrangement entirely. A worker who’s offered guaranteed hours can turn the offer down and stay on their existing contract if they’d rather keep the flexibility, something the government has been explicit about protecting for people who genuinely want it, students, people with caring responsibilities, and others who benefit from variable hours.
The scale of who this affects is worth grounding in real numbers. ONS data puts the current zero-hours workforce at around 1.2 million people, roughly 3.6% of all UK employment. It’s not spread evenly. CIPD’s own research and UKHospitality both confirm the same concentration independently: hospitality, retail, transport, arts and entertainment, and health and social care carry the bulk of it.
What’s Actually Still Being Decided
Here’s the part that makes “what we know so far” the honest title for this piece rather than a hedge: the actual mechanics of all three rights are still genuinely open.
Baker McKenzie’s analysis of the government’s consultation, which closed on 25 August 2026, confirms the scale of what’s still unresolved:
- The low-hours threshold: the consultation considered a range from 8 to 48 hours a week, with the government’s own stated preference sitting between 8 and 20
- What counts as “reasonable notice”: somewhere between 1 and 4 weeks, still to be fixed in regulations
- How the guaranteed-hours offer gets calculated: mean or median average hours over the reference period, a genuinely different outcome depending on which method is chosen
- The reference period itself: UKHospitality confirms the government’s stated preference is 12 weeks, though sector voices are already pushing for longer, arguing that 26 weeks would give a more accurate picture of genuinely variable work
None of this has a final answer yet. The consultation has closed, but the regulations that will actually settle these numbers haven’t been published, which means any specific figure quoted right now, including the government’s own stated preferences, should be read as a starting point for discussion, not a confirmed rule.
What Doesn’t Trigger a Payment (The Parts Already Decided)
Not everything about this reform is still up in the air. A few specific mechanics are already settled, confirmed directly in GOV.UK’s factsheet, and worth knowing precisely.
The right to reasonable notice, and the right to a short-notice cancellation payment, both apply specifically to employer-initiated changes. If a worker tells their employer at short notice that they can no longer work a shift, or simply doesn’t turn up, that’s a worker-initiated cancellation, not an employer-initiated one, and no payment is owed. The same logic applies if two workers voluntarily agree between themselves to swap a shift at short notice: the worker giving up the shift isn’t entitled to a payment either.
This distinction matters practically, because it means the new rights aren’t a blanket guarantee against every kind of shift disruption. They’re specifically aimed at situations where the employer is the one changing the plan, not the worker.
How This Applies to Agency Workers
Agency workers get the same three rights, but the mechanics work slightly differently given the three-way relationship between worker, agency, and hirer, confirmed directly in GOV.UK’s factsheet:
- The hirer is responsible by default for making the guaranteed hours offer, reflecting the hours the worker actually worked under that hirer’s direction during the reference period. If accepted, the worker moves onto a contract directly with the hirer, not the agency.
- The agency is responsible for making short-notice payments directly to the worker, specifically so the worker isn’t left waiting while a dispute over liability gets sorted out. The agency can then recoup that payment from the hirer afterward.
- The same worker-initiated exclusion from the section above applies here too, neither the agency nor the hirer owes a payment if the worker cancels the shift themselves.
The scale here is real. An estimated 900,000 people were working in temporary agency jobs in the UK as of March 2024, with around 140,000 of them also on a zero-hours arrangement. A 2021 Agency Worker Survey found genuine appetite for change: 55% of agency workers had requested a permanent contract between January 2019 and September 2020, most commonly citing job security and a more consistent working pattern as their reasons.
What Happens If an Employer Gets This Wrong
The consequences for breaching these rights aren’t uniform across all three:
- Guaranteed hours: Trowers & Hamlins confirms a dismissal because a worker accepted, or refused, a guaranteed hours offer is automatically unfair, with no minimum length of service required to bring the claim. Darwin Gray independently confirms the same mechanism.
- Reasonable notice: a breach here doesn’t carry the same automatic unfair dismissal protection. It’s treated as a detriment instead, still enforceable through an employment tribunal, but a genuinely narrower category of protection than the one attached to guaranteed hours specifically.
That distinction matters for how seriously each right needs to be treated operationally. Getting a guaranteed hours decision wrong carries the heaviest, most immediate legal consequence of the three.
What Employers Should Do Now
None of the open questions above are a reason to wait until the regulations land.
- Identify every worker currently on a zero-hours or low-hours contract now, rather than waiting to find out later which of them will qualify once the threshold is finally set.
- Start tracking actual worked patterns, since whatever reference period and calculation method get confirmed, the underlying data, how many hours someone genuinely works, week to week, is what any future guaranteed-hours offer will be built on.
- Watch for the two-tier workforce risk. Brabners flags a real possibility: employers shifting toward fixed-term contracts specifically to avoid the guaranteed hours obligation, creating one group of workers with genuine security and another without it. That’s a real operational choice worth thinking through deliberately, not drifting into by accident.
- Build a review point into whatever policy you draft now, since the specific thresholds, notice periods, and calculation method are all still provisional. A policy written around today’s best guess will likely need updating once the regulations are actually published.
- Don’t assume every sector gets treated the same. Hospitality and other high-flexibility sectors are already pushing back on aspects like reference period length, and the final rules may end up reflecting sector-specific pressure in ways that aren’t yet visible in the consultation document alone.
How Avado Can Help
Getting ahead of a reform that’s still being finalised requires the same judgement this whole series has pointed to: knowing what’s actually confirmed, what’s genuinely still open, and how to prepare for both without overreacting to either. Avado’s HR Compliance for Managers course, presented by employment law specialist Amanda Chadwick, builds exactly that judgement, covering the Employment Rights Act 2025 changes as they land, not just the ones that are already finished.
Explore HR Compliance for Managers and make sure your organisation is ready before the regulations, not after!
