Guide
Zero hours contracts and the Employment Rights Act 2025
Updated
Zero hours arrangements are the part of UK employment documentation that has moved most, and the part where an old template is most likely to be actively misleading rather than merely incomplete.
The baseline has not changed
A zero hours worker is a worker. The section 1 duty applies in full: a written statement, given not later than the beginning of the employment, with the particulars in a single document.
The particular that carries the weight here is hours and days of work and if and how they may vary. For a wholly variable arrangement that means describing the mechanism: how shifts are offered, how they are accepted, and what happens if none are offered. A statement saying that hours are as agreed from time to time describes nothing and satisfies nothing.
What the 2025 Act carries
The Employment Rights Act 2025 includes sections headed "Right to guaranteed hours", "Shifts: rights to reasonable notice", "Right to payment for cancelled, moved and curtailed shifts" and "Exclusivity terms in zero hours arrangements". Those are the headings in the Act as enacted, and each of them describes a right that a pre-2025 template does not contemplate at all.
It also carries sections headed "Statutory sick pay in Great Britain: removal of waiting period" and "Statutory sick pay in Great Britain: lower earnings limit etc", both of which touch terms that appear in a written statement.
Why commencement is the question
An Act of this size is brought into force in stages by commencement regulations, not all at once on Royal Assent. So the useful question for a document you are drafting today is not what the Act says, but which of its provisions are in force today.
That is checkable rather than guessable: the Act's own page on legislation.gov.uk carries the commencement information, and the version shown is the version in force. This site does not assert which sections are commenced, because that changes and a page that asserts it goes stale silently. The link is the answer.
How to draft so it survives
Write the shift mechanism down properly: how work is offered, the notice given, and what happens when a shift is cancelled, moved or cut short. If a right to payment for cancelled shifts commences, a document that already describes cancellations needs a clause added rather than a rewrite.
Do not include an exclusivity term. Keep any guaranteed minimum, if there is one, in its own numbered clause so that a guaranteed hours obligation can be attached to it. And date the document, because the honest answer to whether a contract complies is always relative to when it was written.