Employment tribunal time limits double from three months to six on 1 October 2026. Samantha Newton FCIPD on what changes for Oxfordshire employers, what does not, and the one reaction to avoid.
Think of the leaver you had last November. Difficult exit, raised voices, a letter you were not entirely comfortable with. By February you had stopped thinking about it.
Run that same exit this October and it is still live in May.
On 1 October the time limit for bringing most employment tribunal claims doubles. Three months becomes six.
What it covers
Most of what actually happens in a smaller business:
- sacking someone, fairly or otherwise
- discrimination
- money taken off someone’s pay that they say should not have been
- someone raising a concern and then being treated badly for it
- breach of contract
Redundancy pay and equal pay claims already ran to six months. This brings almost everything else into line.
The bit that catches people out
The new six months only applies to things that happen on or after 1 October. If the problem happened before that date, the old three month limit still stands.
So for a while you have two clocks running. A dismissal on 29 September carries a three month window. A dismissal on 2 October carries six.
Which raises the obvious question, and the obvious wrong answer.
No, this is not a reason to push a dismissal through in September.
A dismissal that will not stand up does not become safe because someone has less time to challenge it. It just fails sooner. And rushing a process to beat a deadline is exactly the thing that gets pulled apart in a hearing.
What a claim actually costs
Worth knowing what you are exposed to.
The most recently published tribunal award statistics, covering April 2023 to March 2024, put the median unfair dismissal award at £6,746 and the average at £13,749. For disability discrimination the median was £17,218 and the average £44,483.
Two things sit behind those numbers that owners tend to miss.
Unfair dismissal compensation is capped. Discrimination is not. Those are different orders of risk and they deserve to be thought about separately.
And the award is not the bill. In the employment tribunal each side normally pays its own legal costs. Winning does not get your fees back. It does not get back the weeks your managers spend on documents, witness statements and hearing days either.
Why six months is a different animal from three
Three months is short. It concentrates minds. A good deal of anger simply runs out of road.
Six months gives it time to set. Time for someone to land a new job, feel steadier, and decide they are not letting it go after all. Time for a solicitor’s letter to land long after you filed the whole thing under done.
Three things follow.
Silence stops meaning safety. Most owners quietly relax at around the twelve week mark. That instinct is now three months out of date.
Your paperwork has to last longer. Six months on, the manager who ran the meeting may have left. The notes may be in their notebook, or nowhere at all. You will be rebuilding a decision from memory against someone who has had half a year to prepare their version.
A weak process does not improve with age. A longer window does not mean a tribunal expects less of you. It means a badly handled dismissal has longer to come back.
What this looks like in practice
One employer wanted to dismiss someone for falsifying timesheets over three months. The evidence looked obvious and the instinct was to act that week.
We paused it, ran a proper investigation, and then dismissed.
The dismissal held. No claim followed.
The investigation did not change the outcome. It changed whether the outcome could be defended. Under the new rules, that question stays open for twice as long.
Three things worth doing before October
Not a project. An afternoon.
- Decide where employee files live and who is responsible for them. One place, one named person.
- Take anyone currently on a formal process, long-term sickness or a performance plan and ask a blunt question. If this ended badly tomorrow, would the paperwork hold up? Not “did we mean well”.
- Tell your managers to write up their reasoning on the day. Same day notes are worth far more than a tidy summary written under pressure six months later.
One other date
On 30 October the harassment rules tighten as well. Employers will need to take all reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment, and will be liable for harassment by third parties such as customers and contractors. Different date, different subject, and it deserves its own article.
The honest summary
This change does not make employees more likely to win. It makes them more likely to still be able to claim.
If you handle difficult situations quickly, informally, and hope they go away, you have just been given a longer runway to fail on.
If you run the process properly at the time and keep a clear record, very little changes. Nothing about 1 October alters what “properly” looks like. It only extends how long you might have to prove it.
If you have a live employee situation and you are not certain it would stand up, the Employee Situation Check takes three minutes and shows you where the risk actually sits: magentahrconsulting.co.uk/employee-situation-check
Samantha Newton FCIPD is an independent HR and Employee Relations consultant and founder of Magenta HR Consulting, working with owner-managed businesses across Oxfordshire and the UK.