The end of pure zero-hours? What guaranteed hours will mean for a business.

What is on the way

Under the Employment Rights Act 2025, workers on zero and low-hours contracts will gain a right to be offered guaranteed hours that reflect the hours they have actually been working over a set reference period. The important detail is where the effort sits: the duty is on you, the employer, to make the offer, and the worker then accepts or declines. It is not a request scheme they have to start themselves.

It does not ban zero-hours working. What it ends is the situation where someone is kept on paper as casual while, in reality, they do a steady shift pattern every week. Two related rights come with it: a right to reasonable notice of shifts, and a right to be paid something when a shift is cancelled or cut at short notice.

Who it covers

It reaches wider than pure zero-hours arrangements. Low-hours contracts are in scope too, and agency workers are expected to be covered, which matters if you bring people in through an agency rather than employing them directly.

There are also expected to be anti-avoidance provisions. In plain terms, quietly gaming your rotas to duck under the offer is not going to be a safe strategy, so it is not worth building a plan around loopholes that are designed to be closed.

The timing, told straight

This is the part not to run ahead of. These zero-hours measures are not in force. The government's roadmap points to them arriving in 2027, and a crucial detail, the exact length of the reference period the hours are measured over, is still being consulted on.

So treat the specifics as expected, not settled. There is no prize for rewriting all your contracts around a date and a number that could still move, and a fair bit of risk in it. What you can do today is low-regret and useful whatever the final detail turns out to be.

Why SMEs should care early

A huge share of businesses run on flexible people: hospitality, retail, care, events, seasonal trade. Usually the informal arrangement suits everyone, the student who wants flexible shifts, the owner who needs reliable cover, right up until it does not.

Think of a bar that keeps three students on zero-hours contracts but, in practice, rosters each of them roughly twenty hours a week, every week. The owner is not a villain for running it that way, it is simply how a bar like that runs. But once this is in force, that steady pattern is likely to become an entitlement to be offered guaranteed hours.

Here is the cost of not being ready. When a worker's offer point arrives in 2027 and you cannot show the real pattern of hours, you are negotiating blind, and may concede more hours than were actually worked, or find yourself arguing it from group-chat screenshots. The companion rights hit the bottom line too: a shift you cancel at short notice will now cost you a payment, which quietly changes how carefully you roster.

The right will hang on the hours people actually work. So the records have to be right.

The one thing worth doing now, and where Jamie HR fits

Get your record of hours worked in order. Everything about this right hangs on being able to show what each person actually did over time, and that is exactly the data most businesses keep worst, scattered across paper rotas, group chats and the manager's memory.

Tidy that up and you win twice. You run a tighter operation today, and when the rules land in 2027 you already hold the reference-period data the whole thing depends on. Jamie HR keeps hours, shifts and staff details in one place, so you can see a steady pattern forming before it becomes a surprise, and meet the offer from real data rather than guesswork. You do not need to act on 2027 today. You do need clean numbers, and those are worth having anyway.