How Mellow tracks the Employment Rights Act 2025 changes

The Employment Rights Act 2025 is the biggest change to UK employment law in a generation, and it does not arrive all at once. Its provisions are phased in across 2024 to 2027, and they sit alongside a cluster of related reforms — holiday pay, flexible working, neonatal care leave, statutory pay upratings — that landed in the same window. Keeping track of what has already commenced, what is still coming, and what each change means for your contracts, payroll and policies is more work than most HR teams have time for.

Mellow's Predictive Compliance module (available on the Enterprise tier) maintains a register of the employment-law changes that affect UK employers and maps each one to the parts of your account it touches. For every change it records the affected modules, the policy updates required, and a readiness status — so you can see at a glance where you already comply and where action is outstanding.

The Employment Rights Act 2025 changes we track

Four of the changes are specific to the Act itself:

- Statutory Sick Pay from day one. The Act removes the three waiting days and the lower earnings limit, so SSP becomes payable from the first day of sickness for all employees. Mellow's payroll engine already calculates SSP from day one.

- Unfair dismissal qualifying period. The qualifying period drops from two years to six months for dismissals on or after 1 January 2027 (two years still applies until then). There is no day-one unfair dismissal right — that proposal was dropped before the Act passed. Mellow flags this as a policy and process change for your probation and dismissal procedures.

- Guaranteed hours for zero-hours and low-hours workers. A right to a contract reflecting the hours regularly worked, with reasonable shift notice and payment for cancelled shifts. The commencement date and the low-hours threshold are still subject to consultation, so this is tracked as upcoming rather than in force.

- Restrictions on fire-and-rehire. Dismissing and re-engaging staff to force through changed terms becomes automatically unfair in most circumstances. Tracked as a change to your contractual-change and consultation processes.

The related reforms in the same window

The register also covers six connected instruments that employers often bundle with ERA 2025:

- Neonatal Care (Leave and Pay) Act 2023 — a day-one right to up to 12 weeks of leave and statutory pay where a baby is admitted to neonatal care.

- National Minimum and National Living Wage uprating (from April 2025).

- Statutory family pay and Statutory Sick Pay uprating for 2025/26.

- Holiday-pay reform — the 12.07% accrual method for irregular-hours and part-year workers.

- Flexible working as a day-one right — two requests per year, a two-month decision window, and consultation before any refusal.

- Carer's Leave Act 2023 — a day-one right to one week of unpaid carer's leave a year.

What is genuinely automated

Some of these changes are built directly into how Mellow runs, rather than being something you track by hand:

- Day-one SSP — the payroll engine pays SSP from the first qualifying day, with no waiting days.

- 12.07% holiday accrual — leave accrues at 12.07% of hours worked for irregular-hours and part-year staff.

- The flexible-working workflow — Mellow enforces the two-request limit, the two-month decision deadline, and the consult-before-refusal step.

For the changes that are about contracts, policies and processes rather than calculations — updating a probation policy, or preparing for guaranteed hours — Predictive Compliance tells you what to update and records whether you have done it. That is the honest scope: Mellow automates the changes that are computational and gives you a mapped, status-tracked plan for the rest.

Why a mapped register beats a checklist

A generic checklist tells you what the law says. Predictive Compliance maps each change to the modules and policies in your own account and records a readiness status against it — so when compliance is questioned by an employee, a tribunal or an auditor, you have a documented, current position rather than a list you still have to work through from scratch.

See our ERA 2025 compliance checklist for the practical audit, and how to update your employment contracts for ERA 2025 for the contract-specific changes.

Predictive Compliance is part of Mellow's Enterprise tier. [Start a free trial →](https://mellowhr.com/register) or [see what's included in each plan →](https://mellowhr.com/pricing)