From 1 October 2026, employees will have twice as long to bring most employment tribunal claims. The standard time limit for claims including unfair dismissal and discrimination will increase from three months to six months under the Employment Rights Act 2025. For breach of employment contract claims in Scotland, the six-month period takes effect on 9 November 2026.
This means workplace disputes will remain capable of becoming tribunal claims for longer, giving employees more time to seek advice, collect evidence and decide whether to litigate. It also means that employers will have to preserve evidence, manage grievances and justify employment decisions over a longer period.
It remains the case that a dispute handled properly in its early stages may never reach tribunal. One allowed to drift, escalate or become poorly documented could be considerably harder to defend several months later.
What changes on 1 October 2026?
Section 152 and Schedule 12 of the Employment Rights Act 2025 increase the limitation period for the majority of employment tribunal claims from three months to six months. The change comes into force on 1 October 2026. The new limit applies where the relevant act, dismissal, conduct or failure complained of occurs on or after 1 October. Where the relevant event occurred before 1 October, the existing limitation period continues to apply. For a series of similar acts, the relevant date will generally be the last act or failure in that series.
The process for bringing a claim has not otherwise fundamentally changed. Claimants generally still need to notify Acas before lodging a tribunal claim, and internal disciplinary, grievance or appeal procedures do not themselves stop the statutory clock.
Why does a longer time limit increase employer risk?
The immediate consequence is that fewer claims are likely to fall away simply because they were brought too late.
The statutory limitation can currently provide employers with an important preliminary defence. In Coutts v Sky Subscriber Services UK Ltd, for example, an unfair dismissal claim was dismissed at a preliminary stage because it had been presented outside the applicable time limit. The claimant’s discrimination claims were allowed to continue under the different discretion available for those claims, although they were ultimately dismissed.
Under the new six-month regime, some claims that might previously have been out of time will instead proceed to consideration on their merits. That does not make the underlying claim stronger. However this can still mean greater disclosure, witness preparation, management time, legal expense and settlement pressure for the employer.
Tribunal risk usually starts long before the tribunal
Most employment disputes develop through ordinary workplace decisions. These can easily spring up where a performance problem is handled badly or a grievance is allowed to sit unanswered. For disabled claimants, including those with neurodiverse conditions, an employment issue can arise where an adjustment request is not followed up or a manager responds defensively to a complaint. Equally, a procedural slip up where a dismissal is rushed because the employment relationship has broken down can spark an employment tribunal.
By the time a dispute reaches tribunal, an employer may be required to defend months or years of decisions, documents, conversations and missed opportunities to resolve the problem earlier.
The change to the six-month limitation period increases the importance of that history. An employee who leaves in October could potentially still be considering litigation well into the following spring. Managers may have moved roles. Memories may have faded. Teams may have been reorganised and relevant emails or messages may be harder to reconstruct. Firms should be ready for this increase in paperwork, and in particular the documents required to defend a tribunal.
Good documentation will become an even more important defence
Tribunals examine what an employer knew, what it did and why it reached a particular decision. That means employers should be able to reconstruct the chronology of a dispute without relying primarily on managers remembering conversations several months later.
Investigations, performance meetings, disciplinary decisions, reasonable adjustments, grievance outcomes, whistleblowing reports and dismissal reasoning should be properly recorded. Decisions affecting an employee after they have made a complaint should have a clear, independent business rationale.
This can be particularly important in whistleblowing and discrimination cases, where chronology may determine whether an apparently adverse decision was genuinely connected to a protected disclosure or characteristic.
The lesson from recent cases is that good records can help employers successfully defend legitimate decisions. Weak records can turn an otherwise defensible decision into a much harder case. Employers should also review document-retention practices so that relevant HR records, correspondence, investigation material and decision-making notes are not routinely destroyed while a tribunal claim could still realistically be brought.
Do not allow grievances to drift
The longer limitation period potentially creates more scope for organisations to resolve problems internally. Employers should use that time to attempt a resolution of an employment issue rather than treating six months as additional breathing space.
A grievance that can be investigated and resolved in several weeks should not be allowed to continue for several months. Delays can entrench positions, damage relationships and generate additional allegations about how the organisation handled the original complaint.
Complaints involving discrimination, harassment, whistleblowing, health and safety, disability or retaliation should also be recognised as potentially higher-risk matters and escalated appropriately. A seemingly straightforward management complaint may contain several overlapping legal issues.
The organisation should identify what kind of concern has been raised, who should investigate it, whether independence is required and what immediate measures may be needed while the investigation takes place.
Train managers to recognise when ordinary decisions create legal risk
Many tribunal claims originate with line managers rather than HR teams. Managers make decisions every day that could potentially turn into a workplace dispite. They may also be the first person to receive a complaint about harassment, discrimination or inappropriate conduct.
Training therefore needs to move beyond simply telling managers what the law says. Managers should understand when they need to pause a decision and involve HR or compliance.
This is especially important where disability, pregnancy or maternity, whistleblowing, harassment or another protected issue may be involved. A poorly phrased email or an undocumented decision can later become part of the evidence considered by a tribunal.
Review dismissal and performance processes before problems arise
The limitation change also forms part of a much wider reform of employment rights under the Employment Rights Act. From January 2027, the qualifying period for ordinary unfair dismissal will reduce from two years to six months and the statutory cap on unfair dismissal compensatory awards will be removed.
Employers therefore have two related changes to consider. More dismissals will potentially fall within ordinary unfair dismissal protection, and employees will have longer to challenge many employment decisions. Fair process, evidence and proportionality remain important even where an employer has genuine concerns about an employee’s conduct or performance. Probation dismissals, senior exits and performance-based dismissals are therefore worth reviewing now rather than waiting until the January changes take effect.
Use the additional time to prevent disputes escalating
Employment tribunal litigation already carries costs well beyond any eventual award. Even a relatively straightforward wrongful or unfair dismissal case can cost between £7,500 and £17,500 plus VAT to defend before final hearing attendance, while more complex discrimination or whistleblowing cases can cost considerably more. That calculation excludes management time, document review, witness preparation, settlement discussions and operational disruption.
The six-month limitation period does not mean that every workplace complaint will become a tribunal claim. Employers can still defend weak claims, and legitimate management decisions remain legitimate. However it does change how quickly employers can assume that a dispute has passed.
From 1 October, good tribunal risk management should begin when the workplace problem first appears. Clear policies, trained managers, prompt investigations, well-run grievance procedures and contemporaneous documentation can help resolve disputes while they are still manageable. Where litigation does follow, those same controls give the organisation the evidence it needs to explain what happened and why.
With the Employment Rights Act continuing to introduce significant changes throughout 2026 and 2027, employment tribunal risk is increasingly a compliance issue that needs to be managed throughout the employment relationship, rather than addressed only once a claim arrives.
