UK tribunal time limits doubled to six months on 1 October, and the change is not retrospective
The extension of employment tribunal claim time limits from three months to six months came into force on 1 October 2026. The commencement instrument is the Employment Rights Act 2025 (Commencement No. 5 and Transitional Provisions) (Amendment) Regulations 2026, SI 2026/954, whose regulation 3 brought section 152 of and Schedule 12 to the Employment Rights Act 2025 into effect.
Three details decide whether it helps you. First, it is not retrospective: regulation 4 provides that the extension does not apply where the relevant date falls before 1 October 2026, so a dismissal effective on 30 September still carries three months. Second, Acas states the new limit as six months less one day, and because early conciliation pauses the clock for up to twelve weeks, the practical outer limit now runs to roughly nine or ten months. Third, tribunal breach-of-contract claims are handled separately: England and Wales are picked up by SI 2026/758 and SI 2026/759, and Scotland follows on 9 November 2026.
Separately, from the same date UK right-to-work checks extended beyond contracts of employment under section 48 of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025. The Home Office published its updated employer’s guide on 11 September 2026. The categories caught are people engaged under a worker’s contract, individual sub-contractors, and online matching services that connect freelancers with clients, where the platform is treated as the employer for checking purposes.
Why this matters
For remote workers the longer time limit is the more useful of the two. Three months runs from the act complained of, and the things that go wrong in remote roles tend to reveal themselves slowly: being left off decisions, having flexibility withdrawn a step at a time, watching promotions go to the people in the room. Six months makes those claims practically available rather than theoretically available. The cut-off is hard, though, so if something happened to you in September, your deadline is still December.
On right-to-work, the scope is narrower than the headlines suggest. Genuinely self-employed people contracting directly with an end client for that client’s own use, individuals engaged through their own personal service company, and true business-to-business purchases of a service all remain out of scope. Penalties apply only to work starting on or after 1 October, and the prescribed contract terms only to contracts entered into on or after that date. If you freelance for UK clients through a platform, expect an identity and documentation check you were not asked for before.
Context
Both measures sit in the same October wave of UK employment reform. The flexible-working reasonableness test and the duty to hold a meeting before refusing a request are separate and do not arrive until autumn 2027.
What to watch
9 November 2026 for Scottish breach-of-contract claims, and the Acas consultation on the revised flexible-working Code of Practice this autumn.