Employment Tribunal Time Limits: What Changed on 1 October 2026

A longer six-month deadline began to apply to employment tribunal claims on 1 October 2026, but not to every claim, and not to breach of contract. Here is how to count yours, and why you should not relax.

Key takeaways

• From 1 October 2026 a six-month time limit begins to apply to employment tribunal claims, but the instrument we can verify extends a defined list of claim types rather than everything, so check the position for your own claim before relying on it.
• Breach of contract claims brought in the employment tribunal in England and Wales still have to be presented within three months less one day of the date your employment ended.
• Until your claim type is confirmed, work to the old deadline: three months less one day from the effective date of termination or the act you are complaining about.
• Notifying Acas for early conciliation pauses your time limit, but only if you notify while the limit is still running, it cannot revive a deadline that has already passed.
• An internal appeal does not extend the tribunal deadline; the two run separately and your deadline can expire while you wait for an appeal outcome.
• If you are already out of time, present the claim anyway and explain the delay, tribunals can extend where it was not reasonably practicable to claim in time, or where it is just and equitable in a discrimination case.

What changed on 1 October 2026

Every employment tribunal time limit is a hard cut-off. Miss it and the tribunal can refuse to hear your case, however strong it is. Until now the standard deadline for most claims was three months less one day. From 1 October 2026 a longer six-month period begins to apply – but it does not arrive everywhere at once, and it does not cover everything.

Three things are true as at October 2026, and you need all three:

• Acas, the statutory workplace advice body, states that from 1 October 2026 the time limit for most tribunal claims increases to six months less one day, and that the longer period applies only where your time limit starts on or after that date.
• The instrument we can point to on legislation.gov.uk – the Employment Tribunal (Extension of Time Limits) (Miscellaneous Amendments and Transitional Provisions) Regulations 2026 – comes into force on 1 October 2026 and extends a defined list of claim types from three months to six.
• Some claims are untouched. A breach of contract claim brought in the employment tribunal in England and Wales still has to be presented within three months less one day of the date your employment ended.

So the safe working rule is this: assume your deadline is three months less one day until you have checked your specific claim type. If the longer period turns out to apply, you have lost nothing by being early. If it does not, being early is the only thing that saves the claim.

Which claims get six months, and which do not

The Regulations that we can read in full on legislation.gov.uk extend the deadline from three months to six for a defined set of complaints, where the act or failure you are complaining about happens on or after 1 October 2026. Those include:

• less favourable treatment of part-time workers, under the Part-time Workers (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment) Regulations 2000;
• less favourable treatment of fixed-term employees, and failure to notify them of vacancies, under the Fixed-term Employees (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment) Regulations 2002;
• refusal of time off under the Information and Consultation of Employees Regulations 2004;
• blacklisting complaints under the Employment Relations Act 1999 (Blacklists) Regulations 2010;
• exclusivity-clause complaints about zero hours contracts (2015 and 2022 Regulations);
• protected disclosure complaints about NHS recruitment under the 2018 Regulations.

That is a narrow, technical list. It is not the list most people who have just lost a job are thinking about. For the bigger everyday claims – unfair dismissal, discrimination, unlawful deduction from wages – the change is part of the wider reform programme under the Employment Rights Act 2025 (Schedule 12 deals with time limits). Acas describes the six-month period as applying to most claims from 1 October 2026. We could not locate the commencement instrument for that core change on legislation.gov.uk at the time of writing, so we are not going to tell you it is settled. Check the live Acas page for your claim type, and treat the shorter period as your working deadline until you have.

The claims that already had six months

Some deadlines were never three months. Statutory redundancy pay claims, equal pay claims, certain trade union claims and claims by members of the armed forces already ran to six months. If that is your claim, nothing about it changed on 1 October 2026.

The claim that stays at three months

Breach of contract claims brought in the employment tribunal – typically unpaid notice, or a contractual bonus or benefit you say you were owed when your employment ended – remain at three months less one day in England and Wales. This matters because breach of contract is very often bundled in with an unfair dismissal claim on the same ET1 form. If you time the ET1 to a six-month unfair dismissal deadline, the contract element can be out of time even though the rest of the claim is not.

Where the table says “check”, it means check. Our employment law solicitors can confirm which period applies to your facts, and it is a short conversation.

How to count your deadline, step by step

Counting a tribunal deadline is mechanical. Do it on paper, and do it today.

1. Find the date the clock starts. For unfair dismissal that is the effective date of termination: the last day of your notice period if you worked or were paid through your notice, or the date you were told you were dismissed if you were dismissed without notice. For a discrimination claim it is the date of the act you are complaining about, or the last act if there was a course of conduct. For unpaid wages it is the date of the payslip on which the money was missing.
2. Add three months. Go to the same date number in the month three months later. If you were dismissed on 14 October, that date is 14 January.
3. Take off one day. That gives 13 January. That is the last day you can present the claim – “three months less one day”.
4. Write that date down and treat it as immovable. If the six-month period turns out to apply to your claim, you will have a second, later date. Do not plan around the later one.
5. Work back 4 to 6 weeks from the deadline and put that in your diary as the day you must have notified Acas. Early conciliation takes time, and you want the pause to start with room to spare.

Two traps catch people out. The first is counting from the date of the dismissal meeting rather than the date employment actually ended – those are often weeks apart. The second is counting from the date of the appeal outcome. An internal appeal does not extend the tribunal deadline. Your appeal can be running and your deadline can expire while you wait for it.

What “presented in time” actually means

The claim is presented when the tribunal receives your completed ET1 claim form — not when you post it, not when you start filling it in, and not when you first contact a solicitor. The online service at GOV.UK is available around the clock and gives you a submission confirmation; keep it. If you submit on paper, allow for postal delays, because the date of receipt is what counts.

Your ET1 must also carry a valid Acas early conciliation certificate number for each employer you are claiming against. If you are claiming against a company and, say, an individual manager for discrimination, you generally need Acas to have been notified about each of them. Getting that wrong can cost you the claim against one respondent while the other proceeds.

One more practical point: you do not have to have every document, every figure or a finished argument to present a claim in time. The ET1 sets out what happened and what you are claiming. Detail can follow. People lose good claims by polishing a form past their deadline.

Acas early conciliation: how it stops and restarts the clock

Before you can present most tribunal claims you must first notify Acas and be offered early conciliation – a free, voluntary process where an Acas conciliator talks to you and your employer to see whether the dispute can be settled without a hearing. You cannot lodge an ET1 claim form without an early conciliation certificate number.

The mechanism that matters for your deadline works like this:

• You notify Acas using their online form. Acas states that when you notify them, your time limit is paused until early conciliation ends.
• The pause only works if you notify Acas within your original time limit. Notify after it has expired and there is nothing left to pause.
• Conciliation is voluntary on both sides. If your employer will not engage, or talks fail, Acas issues an early conciliation certificate with a unique reference number.
• When conciliation ends, the clock starts running again and you use the certificate number on your ET1.

We are deliberately not giving you a formula for how many days you get back at the end. The calculation depends on when you notified, when the certificate was issued and the type of claim, and getting it wrong by a day is fatal. Check the current rules on the Acas early conciliation page, and if there is any doubt, present the claim early rather than calculating to the last day.

What happens if you are out of time

If you present a claim after the deadline, the tribunal does not automatically throw it out, but you are on the back foot and you have to ask permission to proceed. Which test applies depends on the claim:

• Unfair dismissal and most Employment Rights Act 1996 claims use the “not reasonably practicable” test. You must show it was not reasonably practicable to present the claim in time, and that you then presented it within a further reasonable period. This is a demanding test. Not knowing the deadline is rarely enough. Serious illness, or being misled about a key fact, sometimes is.
• Discrimination claims under the Equality Act 2010 use the wider “just and equitable” extension. The tribunal weighs the reason for the delay, how long it was, and whether the delay makes a fair hearing harder for the employer. It is a broader discretion, but it is still a discretion — nobody is entitled to it.

Practical point: if you are already out of time, do not stop. Present the claim anyway, explain the delay clearly and honestly in the ET1, and put your evidence for the delay (medical letters, correspondence, dates) in front of the tribunal early. A late claim that is issued has a chance. A claim that is never issued has none.

Worked examples: three dismissal dates, three deadlines

These are hypothetical illustrations to show the counting method. They are not predictions about any real case, and they assume the shorter three-month period, which is the safe assumption.

Hypothetical 1: dismissed with notice worked

Imagine a warehouse supervisor told on 2 October 2026 that she is dismissed, who then works a four-week notice period ending 30 October 2026. The effective date of termination is 30 October, not 2 October. Three months takes her to 30 January 2027; less one day gives 29 January 2027. She should notify Acas by mid-December at the latest.

Hypothetical 2: dismissed without notice, then appeals

Imagine an office administrator summarily dismissed on 9 October 2026 for alleged misconduct, who appeals internally on 16 October. The appeal is not heard until January. His deadline still counts from 9 October: 8 January 2027. He should notify Acas in November and not wait for the appeal outcome.

Hypothetical 3: a deduction rather than a dismissal

Imagine a delivery driver still in her job, whose employer docks two days’ pay from the payslip dated 25 October 2026 without a contractual right to do so. Her clock runs from 25 October. If deductions continue each month, the clock can run from the last deduction in the series — but she should not gamble on that, and should count from the first one she wants to challenge.

In every one of those examples, the first useful step is working out whether you have an unfair dismissal claim at all, because that determines whether the deadline is worth protecting.

What to do this week

1. Write down your start date. The effective date of termination, or the date of the act you are complaining about. Check it against your payslips, your P45 and your dismissal letter, they do not always agree, and if they do not, that itself is worth advice.
2. Calculate the three-month-less-one-day date and diarise it, plus a reminder six weeks before.
3. Gather the documents now. Contract, staff handbook, all payslips for the last 12 months, the invitation and outcome letters for any disciplinary or redundancy meetings, notes of meetings, and any relevant emails or messages. Download anything held on a work system before your access is cut off.
4. Notify Acas. It is free, it is done online, and it starts the pause on your time limit. You do not need a solicitor to do it, and doing it does not commit you to a claim.
5. Get the claim type confirmed. Whether you are on a three-month or six-month clock depends on what you are actually claiming, and most people have more than one claim. If you want us to look at it, our employment law solicitors deal with this daily, and what our fees look like is published on the site so there are no surprises.
6. If money is the obstacle, check whether you have legal expenses cover on a home or motor insurance policy, whether your union will assist, or whether Acas or Citizens Advice can help you at no cost. None of that changes your deadline, so start it now.

Rule changes tend to make people relax. This one should not. Until the position for your specific claim is confirmed, the three-month date is the date that counts.

Frequently asked questions

What is the employment tribunal time limit in 2026?

For most claims the limit was three months less one day. From 1 October 2026 a six-month period begins to apply, and Acas states that most claims move to six months less one day where the time limit starts on or after that date. The instrument we could verify on legislation.gov.uk extends a defined list of claim types, so check the position for your specific claim and work to the shorter date until you have.

Does Acas early conciliation extend the time limit?

It pauses it. When you notify Acas, your time limit is paused until early conciliation ends, and you then receive a certificate with a reference number you must use on your ET1 claim form. The pause only works if you notify Acas while your time limit is still running. Do not try to calculate the restart date to the last day – present the claim early instead.

What is the time limit for an unfair dismissal claim?

The clock runs from the effective date of termination – the last day of your notice period, or the date of dismissal if you were dismissed without notice. The traditional limit is three months less one day under section 111 of the Employment Rights Act 1996. A six-month period is being introduced from 1 October 2026 for most claims, so confirm which applies to you on the live Acas page before relying on the longer period.

Can I still claim if I am out of time?

Sometimes. For unfair dismissal the tribunal can extend where it was not reasonably practicable to claim in time and you then claimed within a further reasonable period – a demanding test. For discrimination claims the tribunal has a wider power to extend where it is just and equitable. Neither is automatic. Present the claim, explain the delay honestly and put your evidence for it in early.

Does the six-month limit apply to breach of contract claims?

No. Breach of contract claims brought in the employment tribunal in England and Wales remain at three months less one day from the date your employment ended. This matters because contract claims – unpaid notice, a withheld bonus – are often combined with unfair dismissal on the same ET1. Timing the form to a longer deadline can leave the contract element out of time.