Unfair Dismissal: Two Years Becomes Six Months

If you have been at your job less than two years, you almost certainly know the feeling: your employer can let you go and there is very little you can do about it. That has been the rule for over a decade. It changes on 1 January 2027, and the change is bigger than most people have registered.

What actually changes

At the moment, to bring an ordinary unfair dismissal claim you need two years' continuous service. From 1 January 2027 that drops to six months.

The change comes from section 25(2) of the Employment Rights Act 2025, brought into force by the Employment Rights Act 2025 (Commencement No. 4) Regulations, SI 2026/559. Nothing about it is speculative — the date is set and the regulations are made.

Throughout the rest of 2026, the two-year rule still applies in full. If you are dismissed in November, two years is your test. There is no early or partial rollout.

Why six months and not day one

This is the part most coverage skipped, and it matters if you have been reading about this for the last two years.

The original proposal was day-one unfair dismissal protection — no qualifying period at all. That is what was announced, what was consulted on, and what most commentary described right up until the Act was passed. It did not survive. The proposal was defeated in the House of Lords and dropped during the Bill's passage, replaced with the six-month period that was eventually enacted.

Alongside it went the "initial period of employment" — a proposed lighter-touch dismissal process for new starters, sometimes described as a statutory probation period. That does not exist. It is not in the Act, and there is no separate simplified procedure for dismissing someone in their first months. If you read about it in 2024 or 2025, that reporting is now out of date.

So the position is simpler than the one that was trailed: one threshold, six months, from one date.

Who gains protection, and exactly when

The test is the effective date of termination — the date your employment actually ends, not the date you were told, not the date you were suspended, and not the date the decision was made.

• Employment ends on or before 31 December 2026: you need two years.
• Employment ends on or after 1 January 2027: you need six months.

There is no transitional period and no phasing. It is a hard cut-over on the date employment ends.

The practical effect is that anyone with six months' continuous service on 1 January 2027 gains the right immediately. You do not start counting again from that date, and you do not have to wait six months from then. Service you have already accrued counts.

If you started your job in June 2026, you will have the protection from 1 January 2027. Under the old rule you would have waited until June 2028.

What has not changed

A qualifying period has never applied to every kind of dismissal, and the day-one protections that already existed are untouched.

You can still claim from day one, with no minimum service, if you are dismissed for a reason the law treats as automatically unfair. That includes pregnancy and maternity, whistleblowing, raising a health and safety concern, asserting a statutory right such as the minimum wage or paid holiday, and trade union membership or activity.

Discrimination claims under the Equality Act have never had a qualifying period either. If you are dismissed because of a protected characteristic — age, disability, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender reassignment, marriage or civil partnership, or pregnancy and maternity — service length is irrelevant, and it always has been.

This matters because the two-year rule has always been misunderstood as a blanket "they can sack you for any reason". They cannot. They can dismiss you without a fair reason or process, which is different, and the exceptions above have always been available.

The compensation change on the same date

1 January 2027 also changes what a successful claim is worth.

At present the compensatory award in an ordinary unfair dismissal claim is capped at the lower of £123,543 or 52 weeks' gross pay. For dismissals from 1 January 2027 onwards, that cap is removed. The basic award, calculated like statutory redundancy pay, is unaffected.

Taken together with the shorter qualifying period, that is a meaningful shift in the balance of risk — more people able to claim, and a higher ceiling on what those claims are worth.

If you are close to the line right now

If you are somewhere between six months and two years' service and things are going badly at work, a few things are worth knowing.

First, your service length is not the only route. Work out whether any of the automatically unfair grounds apply to your situation, because if one does, your service length stops mattering entirely.

Second, the date your employment ends is what counts, and notice periods can move it. If you are given notice in December 2026 that expires in January 2027, the effective date of termination falls on the later date. That is worth checking carefully rather than assuming.

Third, get your dates written down now — start date, any break in service, any TUPE transfer that carried service across. Continuous service is often longer than people think, and it is far easier to establish while you still have access to your payslips and contract.

What this means for employers

If you employ people, the practical change is that the window in which dismissal carries little risk shrinks from twenty-four months to six.

The realistic response is not to rush dismissals before the deadline — a dismissal timed to beat the change is still open to challenge on other grounds, and it looks exactly like what it is. It is to make sure probation reviews actually happen, that concerns are recorded when they arise, and that anyone dismissed after six months has a documented reason and a fair process behind it.

Most unfair dismissal claims are lost on procedure rather than on the underlying reason. That does not change in 2027. There will simply be more people able to bring one.

Check where you stand

Our free Employee Rights checker will tell you which protections apply to your own situation and service length, including whether any of the day-one grounds are in play. If you are already facing a dismissal, the Employment Tribunal checker covers time limits and the ACAS early conciliation step you have to go through first.

Worth reading alongside this: tribunal deadlines double on 1 October 2026, which changes how long you have to bring a claim, and what counts as constructive dismissal if you are being pushed towards resigning rather than dismissed outright.