Employment law

The tribunal claim window is doubling. Here's what that actually changes.

By Nichola Morgan MCIPD · Reviewed 4 September 2026

Someone resigns in March, it wasn't handled brilliantly. By June, you haven't given it much thought. The watchout is that from October 2026, that person that left in March could still bring a claim.

I want to talk about a change that sounds like housekeeping and isn't.

Most employment tribunal claims currently have to be brought within three months of the event, less one day. Under the Employment Rights Act 2025, that window is expected to double to six months from October 2026.

When I mention this to business owners, the reaction is usually a shrug. It is a procedural detail. It doesn't change what is lawful, it doesn't change what you can and can't do, and it doesn't come with a new policy to write. So it tends to get filed away.

I'd gently push back on that, because the length of that window decides something quite practical: how long your version of events has to stay standing up.

What three months actually bought you

Imagine a manager — I'll call her Maria — who runs a team of eight. In February she has a difficult conversation with someone about repeated lateness. It goes reasonably well. She doesn't make a note, because she's busy and it felt like an ordinary conversation rather than a formal one.

In March the person resigns. There is a slightly awkward last week and then they're gone.

Under the current rules, if nothing has arrived by mid-June, you won't have to recall it. Something to consider is that, three months is short enough that Maria is still in the job, still remembers the conversation, and could give a clear account of it if she had to. The team is largely the same. Nothing much has moved.

Now stretch that to six months.

It is September, Maria has had a busy summer, two people have joined, one has left, and she has had perhaps forty difficult conversations since February. When asked what was said in that particular meeting, she will do her honest best. But she is now reconstructing rather than recalling, and there is a real difference between the two.

What actually changes

Three things, and none of them are legal.

The gap between the event and the challenge gets longer. Very few people lodge a claim in the first flush of anger. They lodge one once they have started somewhere new, talked it over with family, retold the story a few times and concluded that it wasn't fair. Six months is a lot more room for that process to run its course.

Memory stops doing the work that records should be doing. This is the one I'd most want owners to notice. In a smaller business, the record of a difficult conversation is very often somebody's recollection of it. That was survivable at three months. It is noticeably weaker at six.

Notes written at the time read differently from notes written afterwards. A short, dated note made on the day of a meeting is a different sort of document from a careful account written six months later, once a claim has landed. Both can be entirely honest. Only one of them reads as contemporaneous, and that difference is visible to anyone looking at it later.

Why this lands harder on smaller businesses

In a large organisation this change is close to invisible, because the process already captures it. HR sits in on the meeting, a note goes on file, the file outlives the manager, and there is a system that remembers even when people don't.

In a business of thirty people there is usually no such system. The record is a line in a notebook, a WhatsApp message, a half-remembered chat by the kettle, or nothing at all. Not because anyone is careless — because everyone is doing three jobs and writing things up feels like the least urgent of them.

I have a lot of sympathy with that. I am not going to tell you to build a bureaucracy you don't need. What I would say is that the informal approach has just become more expensive, and that the thing which closes most of the gap costs about five minutes.

What the businesses who find this easy tend to have in common

I notice a pattern in the ones who never seem to be scrambling for evidence.

It isn't sophisticated software. It is usually a habit: after any conversation about someone's conduct, their performance, or a complaint they've raised, somebody writes three or four lines the same day. What was discussed. What was agreed. What happens next. Dated. Often sent to the person afterwards so they can say if they remember it differently.

That last part does more than people expect. If the employee reads it at the time and doesn't object, you have a shared account rather than yours against theirs. If they do object, you find out in March rather than in September, which is a much better time to find out.

None of this is about building a case against anyone. Most of these notes are never looked at again. They exist so that the version of events which survives is the accurate one rather than the most recent one.

What this doesn't tell you

Whether a particular claim succeeds has very little to do with time limits and a great deal to do with what actually happened and how it was handled. A longer window does not make a weak claim strong. It makes a poorly documented decision harder to defend, which is a different thing.

There are also circumstances in which time limits can be extended, paused, or treated differently, and the position varies between claim types. Where a specific situation is already live, that is a question for an employment solicitor rather than for an article like this one.

The short version

Nothing about this change makes you more likely to be in the wrong. It makes it more likely that you will be asked to explain yourself a long time after the fact.

If a single habit comes out of reading this, I'd make it the five-minute note. It is the least glamorous thing in HR and, over a year, probably the most useful.

General information, not legal advice. Correct as at August 2026; timetables can change.