Shift-based work in the UK is changing faster in 2026 than it has in a generation. New legal duties on guaranteed hours and shift notice, a widening flexibility gap between desk and frontline staff, and high turnover in hospitality and retail are reshaping how employers plan, staff and keep their teams.
This guide sets out what has actually changed, what it means for the way you run a rota, and where the practical pressure points sit for hospitality, retail and services businesses. Shiftbase builds scheduling, time tracking and absence management into one platform for exactly these teams, so we see these shifts play out daily. Below, the evidence and the sources behind each point.
What's changing for shift and zero-hours workers under the Employment Rights Act 2025?
The Employment Rights Bill became law as the Employment Rights Act 2025, receiving Royal Assent on 18 December 2025, with changes phased in across 2026 and 2027 (gov.uk). It is the largest overhaul of UK employment law in decades, and shift-based businesses are among the most affected.
The headline change for hourly teams: from 2027, employers will have a duty to offer workers who regularly work consistent hours a contract that reflects those hours, based on a reference period the government expects to run to around 12 weeks. Zero-hours contracts are not being banned. Instead, workers who in practice work a stable pattern gain the right to a contract that matches it. These protections extend to agency workers as well as directly employed staff.
Alongside guaranteed hours, the Act introduces a right to reasonable notice of shifts and a right to payment when shifts are cancelled, moved or cut short at short notice. The detail is being set through a government consultation that closes on 25 August 2026. The government estimates that 2.1 million workers could benefit from the new measures.
The direction of travel is clear across Europe, not only the UK: the EU has pushed in the same direction on precarious and platform work over recent years, and one-sided flexibility is increasingly treated as a business risk rather than a business tool.
How much notice do employers now have to give for shifts?
There is no fixed statutory figure yet, the Employment Rights Act requires "reasonable" notice, and the government will set what counts as reasonable through regulations. But the data explains why the rule exists. According to the Living Wage Foundation, 55% of shift workers receive less than one week's notice of their shifts, and around a quarter of variable-hours workers have had shifts cancelled unexpectedly. When shifts are cancelled, 90% of those workers do not receive full pay, and 26% receive nothing at all.
Short notice is not a minor inconvenience for staff. When the Living Wage Foundation asked workers to rank what mattered most in a job, 87% said stable pay from week to week was important — placing it above every other quality, including the level of pay itself. Predictable hours are, for many hourly workers, the deciding factor in whether they stay.
For employers, the practical answer is to publish rotas further ahead and to make changes visible the moment they happen.
Is pay transparency coming for hourly pay too?
Yes, and this is where the UK sits inside a much bigger European shift. In the EU, the Pay Transparency Directive (Directive (EU) 2023/970) had a transposition deadline of 7 June 2026, which the European Commission confirmed would not be extended. Most member states missed it: by the deadline only a handful, including Slovakia, Italy, Lithuania and Malta, had transposed it fully, leaving employers across the bloc facing a fragmented rollout into 2027.
The Directive's requirements matter for any business hiring hourly staff in the EU. Employers must share a salary or salary range with candidates before interview, cannot ask about pay history, and cannot use pay-secrecy clauses. Employers with 100 or more staff must report their gender pay gap, and where an unexplained gap of 5% or more appears in a job category, they must carry out a joint pay assessment with worker representatives. Crucially, the right to request individual pay information applies regardless of company size, so even small employers are in scope for parts of it.
The UK is not bound by the Directive, but it is moving in a similar direction: gender pay gap reporting already applies to larger employers, and the government has indicated it is considering further pay transparency measures. For businesses operating on both sides of the Channel, the simplest response is to hold clear, consistent, defensible pay structures everywhere, rather than to manage a different standard in each country.
Why is staff turnover so high in hospitality and retail?
Because the roles are shift-based, often lower-paid and filled by a young workforce, hospitality carries the highest turnover of any UK sector. CIPD analysis of ONS data puts hospitality attrition at around 52%, against a UK average of roughly 34%. Within a single year, 40% of hospitality workers move to another employer in the same sector, and a further 12% leave the industry altogether.
The cost is real. Replacing one employee is estimated at over £30,000 on average once recruitment, lost productivity and training are counted (Oxford Economics). For a business already running on thin margins, losing and rehiring half the team each year is a structural drain, not a background cost.
Pay pressure sits on top of turnover. From 1 April 2026, the National Living Wage for workers aged 21 and over rose to £12.71 an hour, and the 18–20 rate rose faster, to £10.85 — which matters because younger staff are heavily concentrated in these roles. Although 16–24s make up only 10% of the UK workforce, they account for 50% of waiting staff and 48% of bar staff (ONS). Low pay is most concentrated here too: in 2025, 53% of hospitality jobs paid below the real Living Wage, the highest of any industry (Living Wage Foundation).
Turnover, notice and pay are not separate problems. Unpredictable hours push people to leave, and every leaver adds recruitment and training cost on top of a rising wage bill. Fair, visible scheduling is one of the few levers that touches all three. It is a theme we cover in more depth in our guide to employee retention strategies.
Why don't frontline workers get the flexibility desk workers do?
Flexibility in the UK has become a tale of two workforces. Since the pandemic, office-based staff have gained hybrid and flexible-hours arrangements at scale, while frontline and shift-based staff have been largely left out. Research by the social enterprise Timewise found that just 3% of shift workers have any real flexibility in their role, even though frontline and place-based workers make up close to half of all UK employees.
The gap is widening rather than closing. Between 2019 and 2024, more than 1.3 million people in higher-paid desk-based jobs gained access to flexible hours, while the number of shift workers able to vary their hours stayed flat at around 6%, roughly 200,000 people. Timewise describes this as "two working Britains."
For shift-based roles, flexibility rarely means working from home. It means input into the rota: some say over which shifts you work, enough notice to plan your life, and a straightforward way to swap or pick up a shift. Giving staff that input is one of the clearest retention moves available to a shift-based employer, and it costs far less than the turnover it prevents. Practical options include letting staff set availability, claim open shifts and request swaps themselves, the mechanics of which are covered in our piece on handling schedule change requests.
What does all this mean for how you build a rota?
The common thread across every change above is that guesswork is getting more expensive. Reasonable-notice rules reward rotas published in advance. Guaranteed-hours duties reward knowing what people actually work over a reference period. Retention rewards giving staff visibility and input. Rising wages reward knowing your labour cost before the shift is worked, not after payroll.
A spreadsheet cannot do this well. It is blank every week, it holds no record of who is available or on leave, and once it is shared it is out of date. A connected system keeps availability, leave, contracts and worked hours in one place, so the rota reflects reality and changes are logged as they happen.
That connection is what Shiftbase is built for. Rotas publish to the team in advance and update in real time; staff manage swaps, availability and Open Shifts in the app; hours flow from the schedule into time tracking ready for payroll; and requests, balances and sick leave live in absence management, connected to the same schedule. For the sector-specific detail, see the industries we serve.
Get ahead of the changes
The businesses that cope best with the 2026 changes are the ones that stop running rotas on memory and spreadsheets. Shiftbase gives shift-based teams predictable scheduling, accurate hours and connected absence management in one place, so you can meet notice rules, keep staff, and see your labour cost before it hits payroll.
See employee scheduling, time tracking and absence management, compare plans on the pricing page, or try Shiftbase free for 14 days — no card, no commitment.
