Hiring in United Kingdom

The UK has some of the strongest employee protections in the world, and if you're hiring there through an EOR, you need to understand the landscape. Statutory notice periods scale with tenure: after one month of employment, an employee gets at least one week's notice, and it goes up by one week for each year of continuous service, capping at 12 weeks. Employees need two years of continuous service to claim unfair dismissal, though the Employment Rights Act 2025 is set to drop that to six months starting January 2027. Redundancy pay follows a formula based on age and length of service: half a week's pay per year of service for workers under 22, one week per year for ages 22 to 40, and one and a half weeks per year for workers 41 and over. Weekly pay is capped at around £700, and only the last 20 years count, so the maximum statutory payout is about £21,000.

Every employee in the UK is entitled to 5.6 weeks of paid holiday per year, which works out to 28 days for someone working five days a week. That figure includes bank holidays, so employers can count those toward the total. Statutory Sick Pay is a day-one right at £123.25 per week, with no waiting period or lower earnings limit. Pension auto-enrollment is mandatory for eligible workers, and employers must contribute at least 3% of qualifying earnings into a workplace pension scheme. Workers are automatically enrolled, and while they can opt out, most stay in.

Working time regulations cap the average working week at 48 hours, calculated over a 17-week reference period. Employees can voluntarily opt out of this limit in writing, but you can't pressure them into it. Maternity leave is 52 weeks total (26 weeks ordinary, 26 weeks additional), with statutory maternity pay covering 39 of those weeks: the first six weeks at 90% of average weekly earnings and the remaining 33 weeks at £194.32 per week or 90% of earnings, whichever is lower. Paternity leave is two weeks, paid at the same £194.32 weekly rate. Both paternity leave and unpaid parental leave are day-one rights with no qualifying service period.

TUPE regulations (Transfer of Undertakings Protection of Employment) are something EOR users should be aware of, even if they don't come up every day. When a business or part of a business changes hands, employees automatically transfer to the new employer on their existing terms and conditions. You can't use a transfer as a reason to dismiss someone or change their contract terms. For smaller businesses with fewer than 50 employees, or transfers involving fewer than 10 employees, there's an exemption from the requirement to elect employee representatives for consultation.