The Clocks Have Gone Forward From Today (in the Employment Tribunal)

The rule and deadline to submit an Employment Tribunal claim has been simple: three months, less a day, to bring most claims. Tribunals enforced it strictly. A claim that arrived one minute late would not be allowed.

From today, that changes. Under section 152 and Schedule 12 of the Employment Rights Act 2025, the primary limitation period for most tribunal claims doubles from three months to six months. This covers unfair dismissal, discrimination, detriment, unlawful deduction from wages, working time, and TUPE claims. Equal pay and statutory redundancy payment claims were already subject to a six-month limit and remain unchanged; they don't increase further.

Two Things Every Employer Needs to Understand Immediately

The new limit applies based on when the act happened, not when the claim is brought. The six-month period applies where the act, omission or dismissal in question occurs on or after 1 October 2026. A dismissal that took effect on 30 September 2026 still carries the old three-month limitation period, even though the claim form might be lodged after 1 October change. Employers need to be precise about dates when assessing live or recent situations.

For a series of acts, it's the last act that counts. Where a claim rests on a course of conduct rather than a single event, such as an ongoing discrimination complaint, the time limit runs from the most recent incident. Under the established principle in Hendricks v Metropolitan Police Commissioner [2003] ICR 530, this can allow a claim to reach back over years of history that predate today, provided the most recent act in the series falls within the new regime.

Why Six Months Isn't Really Six Months

This is the detail that matters most for practical planning. The headline limitation period is six months but by the time a claim actually reaches an employer's door, considerably more time may have passed.

Acas early conciliation stops the clock for up to twelve weeks, since the conciliation period was doubled in December 2025. That alone can take the effective window to around nine months from the dismissal or act in question. Section 207B(4) of the Employment Rights Act 1996 can add a further extension of up to a month after the conciliation certificate is issued, and the tribunal's own time to serve the claim form adds more still. Employers could realistically be looking at the best part of a year between the original event and the ET1 landing.

Under the old three-month regime, if no claim had arrived by month four or five, a business could reasonably close the file. That confidence no longer applies. A claim may now surface many months after everyone involved has moved on, and after key evidence may already have been lost.

What This Means in Practice

Two consequences are worth planning for. Firstly, there will likely be more claims. Employees who were signed off with stress, waiting on an internal appeal outcome, or simply unaware of the time limit, previously missed the window entirely. Many of them won't now.

Secondly, the claims that do arrive are likely to be better prepared. Six months plus conciliation gives genuine time to take advice, gather documents, and properly exhaust grievance and appeal procedures without racing against a deadline. Some of this is genuinely positive, since more disputes should resolve internally as a result. But the claims that do proceed are likely to be well organised, built around events employers may have only a patchy record of by the time they're challenged.

The Document Retention Problem

This is the change with the least visibility and the most practical risk. Many organisations run scheduled destruction protocols based, consciously or not, around the old three-month rule. Teams and Slack messages purged at 90 days, CCTV footage overwritten within a month, managers' notes from a redundancy exercise binned once an appeal concludes. From today, the safe destruction point for anything connected to a dismissal, grievance, or contested decision needs to move to twelve months at the earliest, and arguably fifteen, to allow a genuine margin for conciliation and service delays. If your retention settings haven't been reviewed recently, they may now be quietly destroying the evidence you'll need to defend a claim.

Impact

This is one of the most consequential and least dramatic-looking, changes in the Employment Rights Act 2025 rollout. It quietly undermines every assumption built around the old three-month rule, from case closure confidence to document retention schedules. We help employers review document retention policies, assess live and recent dismissals against the correct transitional rules, and prepare for a tribunal landscape where claims arrive later and better prepared. Get in touch if you'd like your processes reviewed.

Contact Oliver Tasker: 📞 Call: 01522 776270 ✉️ Email: oliver@impactemploymentlaw.co.uk

Advice. Protection. Impact.