From 1 October 2026, the time limit for bringing the majority of employment tribunal claims increases from three months to six months.
Six months sounds straightforward enough. But for employers, the practical timescale could be much longer.
Factor in Acas early conciliation, which can now last up to 12 weeks and pauses the limitation clock, followed by the time it takes the tribunal to process and serve an ET1, and you could be looking at the best part of a year between the event complained about and the claim actually landing with you.
That has some significant consequences for HR teams: longer record retention, witnesses who may have left the business, managers trying to remember conversations from months ago and disputes staying alive for much longer than they used to.
So, we’ve done the maths.
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Employment tribunal time limits are increasing to six months
What’s changed
From 1 October 2026, the Employment Rights Act 2025 increases the time limit for the majority of employment tribunal claims which previously carried a three-month limit to six months. That includes claims such as unfair dismissal and discrimination. Equal pay and statutory redundancy payment claims already generally had six-month limits.
There are exceptions and specialist deadlines, so “every employment tribunal claim now has six months” would be too broad. Interim relief applications, for example, can still require a claim to be made within seven days of dismissal.
The transitional rules matter too. Broadly, the new limits apply where the relevant act, conduct or failure complained about occurs on or after 1 October 2026. Where a complaint involves a series of similar acts or failures, it is generally the date of the last act or failure that matters for these transitional provisions.
Why it matters
Three additional months gives employees considerably longer to decide whether to pursue a claim, obtain advice, complete internal processes and gather information.
The Government’s stated intention is partly to give both sides more time to resolve disputes internally or through conciliation before proceedings are started. That may help some disputes settle without litigation. But employers should also expect potential claims to remain live for longer.
The point at which you might previously have felt reasonably confident that an issue was finished has moved.
What to do
Don’t treat the end of a grievance, appeal, disciplinary or dismissal process as the point at which the file can disappear into the archive. Build the new claim window into your processes, record retention arrangements and litigation risk assessments now.
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Six months doesn’t necessarily mean six months
What’s changed
Acas early conciliation can now last for up to 12 weeks. Where Acas is notified within the applicable tribunal time limit, early conciliation pauses the limitation clock while that process takes place.
Once early conciliation ends, the claimant will usually have at least one month from receipt of the Acas certificate to submit their claim, although the precise deadline depends on the circumstances. So, the practical timeline could look very different from the headline six months.
An employee could wait until relatively late in their six-month claim window before notifying Acas. The limitation clock then pauses during early conciliation. Once that finishes, they may still have further time to issue proceedings. Add the time taken by the tribunal to process and serve the ET1 and, in some cases, an employer might not know a claim has been issued until many months after the original event.
We’re currently seeing delays of around two to three months in some claims being processed and served.
Put all of that together and “six months to bring a claim” can, in practice, mean the ET1 doesn’t land on your desk until the best part of a year after the event – potentially longer depending on the particular timetable.
Why it matters
Think about how much can change in a year. Managers leave. Teams restructure. Email accounts are closed. Messages are deleted. Memories become less reliable.
And if the claim reaches a final hearing much later, the gap becomes wider still. We’re already seeing some cases listed for hearings more than three years away in parts of the UK.
A manager who made the decision today may be trying to explain it to a tribunal several years from now. That makes the evidence you preserve at the time far more useful than somebody’s recollection later.
What to do
Review when you close employment relations files and what happens to the evidence once you do.
If a dismissal, grievance, discrimination complaint, disciplinary decision or another contested issue could realistically lead to proceedings, make sure the relevant material is identified and preserved rather than relying on somebody being able to reconstruct events later.
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Your document retention rules need another look
What’s changed
The longer claim window means records relevant to a potential tribunal claim may need to be retained for longer. This isn’t limited to documents sitting in an HR folder. Depending on the dispute, evidence might include:
- emails;
- Teams or other internal messages;
- meeting notes;
- investigation records;
- performance documentation;
- grievance and appeal documents;
- rota or timekeeping information;
- CCTV;
- recruitment records; and
- notes held by individual managers.
Automated deletion is particularly easy to overlook. If your systems routinely delete messages, recordings or other records after a short period, potentially useful evidence could disappear before you even know a tribunal claim exists.
Why it matters
A tribunal claim arriving later does not make records made at the time any less important. Quite the opposite.
Three years down the line, a short note explaining why a manager reached a particular decision may be considerably more useful than asking that manager to remember exactly what was said during a meeting in 2026.
And there’s an additional complication: by the time the hearing arrives, that manager may no longer work for you.
What to do
Speak to HR, Legal and IT about your retention arrangements rather than looking at the HR policy in isolation. Check what is actually happening automatically across email, Teams, Slack, CCTV and other systems.
Any changes to retention periods should, of course, also be considered against your wider data protection obligations. Keeping everything indefinitely isn’t the answer. Making sure relevant evidence isn’t routinely destroyed before a potential dispute has played out is.
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Identify witnesses while you still employ them
Longer timescales also make witness management more important. People move roles and leave organisations. That becomes particularly awkward where somebody was central to a dismissal, investigation or grievance and you only start thinking about their evidence years later.
For significant or potentially contentious decisions, identify the relevant witnesses early and keep appropriate contact details.
It’s also worth reviewing whether your contracts contain sensible provisions requiring employees to provide reasonable assistance with legal proceedings after their employment ends, where appropriate.
None of that replaces getting a proper witness statement when proceedings are underway. It simply avoids discovering three years later that the person who made the decision has disappeared and nobody knows how to contact them.
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Use the extra time rather than simply waiting through it
There is an upside to the longer window. The Government’s intention is to give employers and employees more time to resolve disputes without litigation. Use it.
Where a dispute looks capable of escalating:
- deal properly with grievances and appeals rather than allowing them to drift;
- assess the legal and commercial risk early;
- preserve the evidence while events are still fresh;
- use Acas conciliation proactively where resolution makes sense; and
- keep a record of attempts to resolve the dispute.
Where somebody is claiming financial loss following dismissal, make sure mitigation remains on the radar too. Claimants are expected to take reasonable steps to reduce their losses, so evidence around job searches and alternative earnings can become relevant when compensation is considered.
The extended timetable shouldn’t become an excuse for letting a dispute sit untouched for months.
What should employers and HR teams be doing now?
The practical changes are fairly simple. The difficulty is making sure they actually happen across the organisation. We’d focus on:
- Reviewing document retention – check how long potentially relevant HR records, emails, messages and other evidence are retained, including automated deletion settings.
- Strengthening the paper trail – make sure managers record important conversations, decisions and the reasoning behind them while events are fresh.
- Training managers – they need to understand that an informal conversation or undocumented decision today could still be examined years later.
- Identifying witnesses early – know who was involved and make sure appropriate contact information is retained if they leave.
- Keeping processes moving – longer tribunal limits are not a reason for grievances, appeals and disciplinaries to drag on.
- Taking advice earlier – if a dispute has litigation written all over it, preserving evidence and deciding your strategy early is much easier than trying to reconstruct everything months later.
How can we help?
Longer tribunal time limits don’t mean every workplace dispute will become a claim. They do mean employers will need to live with potential claims for longer, all while the tribunal system itself is already taking longer to process and hear cases.
Our employment law and in-house litigation teams can help you manage disputes before and after they reach tribunal, from early risk assessment and Acas conciliation through to defending proceedings.
We can also help review your employee relations processes, train managers and sense-check whether your document retention approach still works in light of the new timescales.
If you’ve not looked at any of that yet, now would be a sensible time.
Give us a shout if you want to talk through your approach.
