Two employment changes already landed. The big one is January 2027.

A ten-person firm has no HR department, and its employment practice is usually whatever it did last time. That is manageable when the rules change every few years. It is not manageable across a rolling programme, which is what this is.

Two things changed in April and a great many small employers have not adjusted for either.

Sick pay from day one is a payroll change and a behaviour change

Paying statutory sick pay from the first day of illness, with no earnings threshold, does two things. It costs more, which is obvious and usually small. And it removes the incentive a low-paid employee had to come in unwell, which is the point of it.

The operational trap is the record. Short absences that previously never reached payroll now do, which means the absence data your firm holds changed shape in April without anyone deciding it should. Any comparison across that boundary is comparing two different things.

Six months is the change that alters hiring

The qualifying period for unfair dismissal was two years. From 1 January 2027 it is six months. The government had been expected to make it a day-one right and settled on six months instead.

Two years is long enough that most small firms never had to think about it — a hire that was not working out was dealt with well inside the window. Six months is not. It is roughly the length of a probation period, which means the probation decision and the legal threshold now sit on top of each other.

The practical consequence is documentation, and it is the same shape as every other obligation on this site. A decision made at five months needs a record made at two, three and four — objectives set, feedback given, concerns raised in writing. None of that is difficult and all of it has to exist before you know you need it.

What is still unsettled

Acas is explicit that how several measures will be implemented is subject to government consultation. Zero-hours entitlements — guaranteed hours, compensation for cancelled shifts, reasonable notice of shifts and changes — are described without a firm date. The flexible working change, requiring employers to give business reasons for refusal and explain why the refusal is reasonable, is placed in 2027 without a day.

Treat any supplier quoting you a precise date for those as guessing. The two April changes and the two January 2027 changes are the ones with dates.

Three things worth doing this quarter

1. Check your payroll actually implements day-one sick pay. It changed in April; a firm that has had no short-term sickness since may not have noticed a misconfiguration.
2. Put the six-month date in the hiring process, not the handbook. A note in a policy nobody opens is not a control. A prompt at the three-month review is.
3. Start writing performance conversations down. Not formally, not as warnings — a dated note of what was discussed. It is the cheapest evidence there is and it is worthless if backfilled.

What this does not tell you

This is not employment law advice and we are not employment lawyers. Which measures apply to a particular contract, and what a fair process looks like under the new threshold, are questions for one.

What we can say is that every item here turns into a record-keeping problem for a firm without an HR function, and that is a solvable problem. The same argument runs through the audit trail note, and the recruitment side of it is where the data work sits. If you want to know which of your processes is worth changing first, the triage tool will tell you most of them are not.