Employment · Employment Rights Act 2025
Six months, not three: employment tribunal time limits change on 1 October 2026
The most practically significant change in the Act for anyone currently in a dispute — and it is arriving with very little public notice.
Principal Solicitor
Published [26 September 2026] · 6 min read
The short version
6 months
for most tribunal claims where the act complained of falls on or after 1 October 2026
3 months
still, for breach of contract claims — running from the date employment ends, not the breach
12 weeks
maximum Acas early conciliation period since 1 December 2025, doubled from six
For as long as anyone practising today can remember, the answer to “how long do I have to bring a tribunal claim” has been the same: three months less one day. It has caught out a very large number of people with good claims, and it is about to change.
From 1 October 2026, the time limit for most employment tribunal claims doubles to six months. The change is made by section 152 of and Schedule 12 to the Employment Rights Act 2025.
What is changing
The three-month limit becomes six months for most tribunal claims — unfair dismissal, discrimination under the Equality Act 2010, harassment, victimisation, whistleblowing detriment, unlawful deduction from wages, and the rest of the tribunal’s ordinary workload.
The exception
Contract claims keep the three-month limit
Breach of contract claims brought in the tribunal keep the three-month limit, and it runs from the date employment ends rather than from the breach. There is a separate date of 9 November 2026 for breach of contract claims in Scotland.
So if your claim is a contractual one — unpaid notice, a bonus due under the contract, wrongful dismissal — you do not have six months, and the clock starts at termination.
The date that matters is not the date you found out
This is where people will go wrong, so it is worth being precise.
The six-month limit applies where the relevant date — the act or failure you are complaining about — falls on or after 1 October 2026. If the thing you are complaining about happened in September, you still have three months, and that period expires in December whatever the new rule says.
Where there has been a series of acts, which is common in discrimination and harassment cases, the extended limit applies only if the last act in the series falls on or after 1 October 2026.
So there will be a period of several months in which two different limits are running side by side, depending on when the conduct occurred. If you are anywhere near a deadline, work out which rule applies to your facts before relying on either.
If the act complained of
Limit
Runs from
falls before 1 October 2026
3 months less one day
the act
falls on or after 1 October 2026
6 months
the act
is a series, last act before 1 Oct
3 months less one day
the last act
is a series, last act on or after 1 Oct
6 months
the last act
is a breach of contract claim
3 months less one day
termination
Acas early conciliation has changed too
Before issuing most tribunal claims you must notify Acas and go through early conciliation. Since 1 December 2025 that period can run for up to twelve weeks, doubled from six.
Early conciliation pauses the limitation clock, which sounds reassuring and is one of the most reliable ways to get a time limit wrong. The stop-the-clock rules are genuinely fiddly, the extension can interact with them in ways that are not obvious, and “Acas had it” is not an answer a tribunal accepts. If your matter is close to a deadline, have someone calculate it properly.
Why this is happening
The three-month limit has always been short by the standards of civil litigation, where six years is the norm for contract and tort. It was designed for a jurisdiction meant to be quick and informal.
In practice it produced a particular unfairness in discrimination and harassment cases. Those are precisely the cases where the claimant is least likely to act quickly — because they are still employed and hoping it resolves, because they are unwell, because they have raised a grievance and are waiting for an outcome, or because it took time to recognise a pattern rather than a series of unrelated slights. An internal grievance process routinely takes longer than three months, and people who did the reasonable thing by using it found they had run out of time to do the legal thing.
Six months does not eliminate that problem. It makes it substantially less common.
What this does not mean
It does not mean waiting is now sensible
Everything that makes a claim strong decays with time. Witnesses leave. Contemporaneous notes stop being contemporaneous. The WhatsApp thread gets deleted when somebody changes phone. Your own recollection of a specific date becomes “sometime that spring”, which is exactly the kind of imprecision that gets taken apart in cross-examination.
There is also a negotiating point. The value of a claim is highest before the employer has had time to build a paper trail explaining what happened. A claim raised in week three is worth more than the identical claim raised in month five, regardless of what the limitation period allows.
It does not extend limits in the civil courts
Different jurisdiction, different rules, unaffected.
It does not revive claims that are already out of time
If your three months expired in August 2026, it expired. Tribunals have a discretion to extend where it is just and equitable in discrimination cases, and where it was not reasonably practicable to present in time in unfair dismissal cases, but those are exceptions, not backstops, and they are refused more often than they are granted.
If you have been told you are out of time
It is worth checking again, for three reasons.
What to do now
This article is general information, not legal advice. Time limits depend on the precise facts and the consequences of getting them wrong are absolute. If you think you may have a claim, take advice on your own position.
Questions
Questions people ask us
Does the six-month limit apply to my claim if I was dismissed in September 2026?
No. The extended limit applies where the act complained of falls on or after 1 October 2026. A September dismissal remains subject to three months less one day.
Does it cover discrimination claims?
Yes — discrimination and harassment claims under the Equality Act 2010 are among those covered, and they are the claims the change was most obviously aimed at. Contract claims are the exception: they keep the three-month limit, running from the date employment ends.
What if the discrimination has been going on for a year?
Where there is a series of acts, time generally runs from the last act rather than the first, and the six-month limit applies if that last act falls on or after 1 October 2026. Continuing conduct is one of the most common reasons a claim that looks out of time is not.
Does Acas early conciliation still pause the clock?
Yes, and the conciliation period itself can now run for up to twelve weeks. The stop-the-clock rules are more complicated than they look, so calculate rather than assume.
I was told last month that I am out of time. Is that still right?
Possibly not, for three reasons: the conduct may have continued into October, the wrong date may have been used, or the claim may be in time as a different cause of action. It takes ten minutes to check.
Sources: Thompsons — tribunal time limits extended to six months · Blake Morgan — October 2026 implementation dates confirmed · Acas — Employment Rights Act 2025 · Hill Dickinson — ERA 2025 tracker.
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