Zero-hours contracts are not being banned. They are, however, about to be measured. The Employment Rights Act 2025 gives qualifying zero-hours and low-hours workers new rights, and the detail of how those rights will work is now being settled. The government’s consultation closed on 25 August 2026. Three days later it published guidance for employers on using zero-hours contracts fairly while the new rules are prepared. The new rights are expected to come into force during 2027.
Office for National Statistics data show around 1.23 million people in the UK on zero-hours contracts between April and June 2026, up from 1.18 million a year earlier. For many of their employers, the coming changes will test something most have never had to defend in detail: the record of when people worked.
What the new rights depend on
Under the Act, a qualifying worker will be entitled to an offer of guaranteed hours that reflects the hours they have regularly worked over a reference period. The government’s consultation proposes a 12-week reference period, and a threshold of between eight and 20 guaranteed weekly hours is under consideration to decide which low-hours workers qualify. Neither figure is final until the regulations are published.
Alongside the offer sit protections on how shifts are set and changed: a right to reasonable notice, and a right to payment when a qualifying shift is changed or cancelled at short notice. The Act caps that short-notice period at seven days, and the regulations may set it lower.
The details differ, but the dependency is the same. Every one of these rights turns on knowing when people worked, not when they were rota’d to work.
The gap between contracted and actual hours
Most organisations have more than one record of a working week; the contracted hours, the rota’d hours and the payroll that reflects what was reported. But it’s the attendance record that captures what happened at the moment it happened, because it is created by the worker as they start and finish a shift.
Consider a warehouse operative contracted for 8 hours a week, but who has been working 25 hours almost every week for months. On paper the arrangement is flexible, but the attendance shows it is a regular pattern, and a regular pattern is precisely what a guaranteed-hours offer is designed to reflect. To make that offer correctly, the employer will need to identify the worker and calculate their hours over the reference period from data it can stand behind.
A record that will stand up to scrutiny
Once a contractual offer or a statutory payment rests on attendance data, the quality of that data matters more than it ever has. Paper timesheets and punches entered by a supervisor at the end of the week are transcribed or edited after the fact, and reflect memory rather than record. Proxy clocking, where one employee clocks in for another, inflates some hours and hides others.
A dedicated timeclock addresses both weaknesses at source. Each punch is timestamped at the terminal and passed to the employer’s workforce management system. Optional biometric verification ties the punch to the individual: fingerprint is available on every terminal in the Grosvenor range, with facial recognition on the GT8 and GT10. Biometric templates are encrypted, and employees who do not consent can clock with a proximity card or ID number instead.
Keeping the clocks working
An attendance record is only as complete as the terminals feeding it. A clock that is out of action at a busy site leaves gaps, and gaps are usually filled by hand, which reintroduces the very edits employers are trying to remove. GTConnect, our cloud connectivity platform, lets support teams diagnose faults remotely and push configuration changes and over-the-air updates to terminals across the estate, often without a site visit.
Making shifts visible
The 28 August guidance asks employers to give as much notice as possible when offering work and to be clear about how work is offered. The GT8 and GT10 can display an employee’s schedule and leave on screen when they clock, depending on the partner integration, giving workers a consistent place to check upcoming shifts. Good notice still depends on managers publishing rotas early. The terminal makes the published rota easier to see.
Hardware and platform working together
A timeclock does not decide who qualifies for a guaranteed-hours offer, and it does not hold rota history. Those jobs belong to the employer’s workforce management or HR platform, which will apply the final rules once they are published. Grosvenor terminals integrate with leading platforms including SAP, MHR, Protime and Synerion, so employers can strengthen how attendance is captured without replacing the systems they already run.
What to do before the regulations arrive
There is no need to rewrite contracts around proposals that may still change. There is good reason to examine the record those contracts will be measured against. Employers should establish how many punches are edited or entered manually each month, and at which sites. Sites still running on paper timesheets, or where terminals are not positioned where shifts begin, deserve particular attention.
Comparing contracted hours with clocked hours over the past 12 weeks will show which workers are likely to fall within scope, and how large the administrative task is likely to be. Employers who start that exercise now will meet the final regulations with evidence rather than estimates.
These reforms apply in England, Scotland and Wales. Employment law is devolved in Northern Ireland, which has its own framework.
To discuss how Grosvenor Technology timeclocks can strengthen your attendance record ahead of the new rules, contact our team on 01202 621700 or at hcmsales@grosvenortechnology.com.
This article is for general information only and does not constitute legal advice. The zero-hours measures in the Employment Rights Act 2025 depend on secondary legislation that had not been finalised at the time of writing (October 2026). Employers should take independent legal advice on their own circumstances.