From 1 January 2027, the qualifying period for unfair dismissal in the UK drops from two years to just six months. That single change turns the first six months of employment – the window most of us call probation – into the only genuinely low-risk period employers have to work out whether someone is right for the role.
We recently ran a webinar on exactly this, bringing together Jamie Lonergan, Account Executive, and Mollie Pullan, HR Specialist, to unpack what’s really changing, what we’re hearing from customers who are already preparing, and where we think the impact will land hardest. Here’s the overview.
What’s actually changing
There are four things worth knowing.
- The qualifying period for ordinary unfair dismissal drops from two years to six months – the two-year rule has been in place since 2012, so this is one of the biggest changes to dismissal rights in over a decade
- There’s no transitional path – any employee with six months’ service on 1 January 2027 is protected immediately, which means everyone hired before roughly the end of June 2026 gains protection the moment the rules switch on, and anyone hired after that reaches six months under the new regime
- The statutory cap on unfair dismissal compensatory awards is being removed at the same time, so financial exposure increases alongside the number of people who can claim
- The act doesn’t regulate probation itself – there’s still no statutory probation period, so length, review points and extension provisions remain entirely down to each organisation to design
That last point is important. The law has raised the stakes, but it’s left the mechanism – your probation framework – down to you.
Why organisations need to act well before January 2027
The commencement date might be over a year away, but the employees this affects are already on the payroll. Everyone hired before the end of June 2026 becomes protected on day one of the new rules. So if a probation review in early 2027 goes badly and there’s no documented trail of objectives, feedback and support behind it, that gap was created now – not in January.
It also changes what “good” looks like for probation design. With the two-year buffer gone, probation stops being a formality and becomes the assessment window itself. After six months, any dismissal has to rest on one of the five statutory fair reasons – capability, conduct, redundancy, illegality or some other substantial reason – and it has to be procedurally fair, with documented objectives, reviews, feedback and support behind it. Inconsistent practice, like a quiet email extension or a review that never happened, stops being an admin slip and becomes genuine legal and financial risk.
Some organisations are already reconsidering whether a six-month probation still makes sense when it now lands exactly on the point protection begins, and are looking at shorter periods – three to four months – with clear, limited extension provisions so decisions can be made well inside the window.
Where probation frameworks commonly fall short
A few patterns come up again and again in conversations with HR, L&D and people leaders:
- Probation end dates tracked in spreadsheets, which fail silently and are easy to miss
- Reviews that happen late, inconsistently, or not at all – and when they do happen, no consistent record of what was discussed
- Extensions applied differently between managers – two new starters treated differently by two managers is exactly the pattern tribunals look for
- Frameworks originally designed around a two-year safety net that hasn’t been reviewed since
- Statutory minimum notice periods quietly carrying an employee over the six-month threshold, making last-minute dismissal decisions risky
Underneath all of this sits one dependency: manager capability. Managers hold the evidence, set the objectives, give the feedback and run the reviews – so a robust framework only works alongside genuinely confident, trained managers.
The questions we’re hearing most
Our probation process is largely manual – what should change? A manual process isn’t automatically non-compliant, but it is fragile, and that’s exactly what the new regime punishes. Rather than jumping straight to a new system, start with an audit of what actually happens today and where the highest-risk gaps sit. If you can only do one thing this quarter, standardise a review form – one template beats ten good intentions.
How do we get managers to complete reviews on time? It comes down to clarity, nudges and escalation. Set review dates automatically from day one rather than relying on memory, remind people early and more than once, and make reviews visible to HR as well as managers – visibility tends to move managers more than reminders do. A quick, structured review template also removes the blank-page problem.
How do we balance compliance with employee experience? This is more of a false trade-off than it looks. The same things that make probation legally robust – clear expectations, regular feedback, visible support, no surprises – are also what make it a better experience. The real risk is treating it as a tick-box exercise. Reframing probation as “here’s how we’ll help you succeed” rather than “a trap to be survived” drives engagement, and matters even more given new-hire attrition tends to peak in the first six months.
What role does onboarding play? Onboarding and probation are the same journey seen from two different angles – one builds capability, the other assesses it. Mapping onboarding milestones directly onto probation review points gives every review genuine, objective progress to discuss.
How can L&D demonstrate value here? Move beyond completion stats and pair them with outcomes – time to competency, probation pass rates, manager confidence. Keeping measurement (did the learning happen), impact (did behaviour change) and ROI (did it deliver value) distinct matters, and manager enablement is the highest-leverage place to focus, since the review conversation is a skill many managers are never actually taught.
What to prioritise over the next 12 months
1.Audit first. Understand your current policies, contracts and day-to-day practice, including where your records actually live
2.Take legal advice on contractual design, probation length and extension clauses in light of the six-month period
3.Review your technology. Can you see every live probation, its milestones and its evidence in one place? If not, that’s a gap worth closing early
4.Invest in manager training – objective setting, feedback, fair reviews and documentation need to sit alongside any technology change
5.Connect HR and L&D around one journey, from offer through to probation outcome, rather than running them as separate processes
If there’s one thing to hold onto, it’s this: build your roadmap backwards from 1 January 2027. The evidence trail for early-2027 decisions starts with the hires being made right now.
Where this leaves L&D and people teams
L&D has a genuinely strategic role here, for two reasons. First, the best way to avoid a difficult probation conversation is to get people competent and confident quickly – structured onboarding, clear learning pathways and early capability building all reduce probation failures. Second, when things don’t work out, a tribunal will effectively ask whether the person got a fair chance – and training records, learning completion and development support all become part of that evidence base.
The organisations that get the most out of this change won’t be the ones treating it purely as a compliance exercise. They’ll be the ones using it as a genuine opportunity to improve performance, retention and employee engagement – building a probation experience people feel supported through, not one they simply survive.
If any of this resonates and you’d like to talk through what it looks like for your organisation, we’d be glad to help.
Click here to watch the full webinar.
Claire Moloney
