Jan 2027: what hiring companies haven't clocked yet

Right now, an employee needs two years' service before they can bring an ordinary unfair dismissal claim. From 1 January 2027, that drops to six months. The cap on compensation goes too, removed entirely. So the two things that used to give employers breathing room, the long qualifying period and the limit on what a claim could cost, are both disappearing at once.
For years, businesses have leaned on that two-year window as a kind of safety net. You could take your time working out whether someone was the right fit, deal with performance issues informally, and generally have some slack before dismissal law properly kicked in. From next January, that slack shrinks to six months. Get past that point with a new starter and you'll need a fair reason and a fair process to let them go, or you're exposed to a tribunal claim. Day-one rights around discrimination and automatically unfair dismissal haven't changed, but this shift to six months is still a real jump in stakes for anyone making hiring decisions.
What that means in practice is that the first six months of someone's employment suddenly matter a lot more than they used to. Interviewing needs to be sharper. Expectations need to be clear from day one, not worked out as you go. Onboarding needs structure, and feedback needs to happen early and be properly documented rather than left as a vague conversation nobody wrote down. Smaller businesses are probably going to feel this hardest, since they're the ones least likely to have dedicated HR support to lean on when something starts going wrong. And with the compensation cap gone, a mistake on a higher-paid hire gets a lot more expensive if it ends up in front of a tribunal.
It's part of why we built our fee model the way we did at Time to Hire. 
We charge 25% when we're engaged to start a search, another 25% when the offer's accepted, and the remaining half only once the new hire's been in place for six months. That's not a coincidence, it's built around the same six-month point the legislation is now anchored to. Holding back half the fee until then means less money is on the table at exactly the moment employers are most exposed, and it takes away some of the pressure that comes from paying most of a fee by the time a hire starts, which is how contingent and retained recruitment has generally worked until now.
None of this replaces good hiring or good management, obviously. No fee structure does that job for you. What it does is line the commercial side up with the legal reality, so there's a bit more room to breathe during the six months that now actually count.
If you're getting ready for January 2027, it's probably worth looking at your recruitment partners, your probation process, and how well documented your early feedback actually is. Six months isn't far off, and the businesses that sort this out now will have a much easier time of it than the ones scrambling in December 2026.