The Employment Rights Act 2025 hit cleaning companies harder than almost any other sector. Since 6 April 2026, Statutory Sick Pay applies from day one of absence with no earnings threshold. Zero-hours contract reforms land in January 2027, requiring guaranteed-hours offers based on 12-week working patterns. Shift cancellation compensation rules follow. For a cleaning company with 50 shift workers across 20 client sites, these are not abstract policy changes. They are daily operational requirements that need systems behind them.
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The Employment Rights Act 2025 introduced several changes that took effect on 6 April 2026. For cleaning companies, two are immediately significant.
The three-day waiting period for SSP has been removed. The Lower Earnings Limit (previously £123 per week) has been removed. Every employee qualifies for SSP from their first day of sickness absence, regardless of earnings level. For an industry built on part-time, low-paid shift workers, many of whom previously fell below the earnings threshold, this is a material change.
What this means operationally: every time a cleaner calls in sick, your system needs to calculate SSP entitlement from day one, track the absence, and manage the payroll impact. With no waiting period, even a single day's absence triggers an SSP obligation. For companies managing dozens of cleaners across multiple sites, the volume of SSP calculations increases significantly.
Employees now have the right to paternity leave and unpaid parental leave from their first day of employment. Previously, these required qualifying service. For cleaning companies that hire frequently and have high staff turnover, this means every new hire has immediate leave entitlements that your system needs to track.
The zero-hours reforms are the most operationally complex change in the Employment Rights Act for cleaning companies. They are expected to take effect from January 2027, following consultation in autumn 2026.
At the end of every 12-week reference period, employers must offer a guaranteed-hours contract to any worker on a zero-hours or low-hours arrangement. The offered hours must reflect the actual hours worked during the reference period. The worker can decline the offer (they are not forced into a fixed-hours contract), but the offer must be made and documented.
For a cleaning company, this means: if a cleaner regularly works 20 hours per week across three client sites over a 12-week period, you must offer them a contract guaranteeing 20 hours per week. If they accept, you are committed to providing (and paying for) those hours, even if a client cancels.
Employers must provide reasonable notice of shift times. The exact notice period will be defined in secondary legislation, but the principle is clear: last-minute shift allocation without reasonable notice will carry consequences.
If a shift is cancelled or curtailed at short notice, the employer may be required to compensate the worker. This applies regardless of whether the cancellation was the employer's fault (for example, a client cancelling a cleaning session at the last minute). Your system needs to record when shifts were scheduled, when they were cancelled, how much notice was given, and whether compensation was paid.
From January 2027, the qualifying period for unfair dismissal drops from two years to six months. Compensation caps are being abolished. Anyone hired from July 2026 onwards will gain protection when this takes effect.
For cleaning companies with high turnover and short probation periods, this changes the risk profile of every hire. Dismissing a cleaner within their first year for performance issues now requires documented evidence of the performance problem, the support offered, and the process followed. Your system needs to support this: performance notes, absence records, training logs, and a clear timeline of actions taken.
| Requirement | Status | What Your System Must Do |
|---|---|---|
| Day-one SSP | Live (6 Apr 2026) | Calculate SSP from first day of absence, no earnings threshold. Track absences per employee with dates and duration. Feed into payroll |
| Day-one leave entitlements | Live (6 Apr 2026) | Track paternity and parental leave eligibility from hire date. No qualifying period |
| Guaranteed-hours offers | January 2027 | Track actual hours per worker per site over rolling 12-week periods. Calculate average weekly hours. Generate guaranteed-hours offer documents. Record acceptance or decline |
| Shift notice requirements | January 2027 | Record when shifts are scheduled and communicated. Log notice period given. Flag shifts allocated below the reasonable notice threshold |
| Shift cancellation tracking | January 2027 | Record shift cancellations with timestamp and reason. Calculate notice given. Determine whether compensation is owed. Maintain audit trail |
| Unfair dismissal protection | January 2027 | Performance records, absence tracking, training logs, disciplinary timeline. All timestamped and retrievable per employee |
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The main cleaning business platforms (ServiceM8, Jobber, ZenMaid, CleanManager, ProCleanerUK) were built for job scheduling, quoting, invoicing, and customer management. They are not employment law compliance tools. For a comparison of their core features, see our cleaning software comparison.
| Platform | Scheduling | Hours Tracking per Worker | SSP Calculation | Guaranteed-Hours Tracking |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ServiceM8 | Yes | Basic (per job) | No | No |
| Jobber | Yes | Basic (timesheets) | No | No |
| ZenMaid | Yes | Limited | No | No |
| CleanManager | Yes | Yes (per site) | No | No |
| ProCleanerUK | Yes | Yes | No | No |
No cleaning software platform currently handles SSP calculation, guaranteed-hours tracking, or shift cancellation compensation. These are employment law functions that sit between your scheduling system and your payroll. CleanManager has published an article on the Employment Rights Act's impact on cleaning companies (acknowledging the challenge), but has not announced compliance features. The gap is real.
For most cleaning companies, the current workaround is manual: track hours in the scheduling tool, export to a spreadsheet, calculate SSP and reference periods manually, and feed the results into payroll. This works for a 5-person operation. It breaks down at 20 people across 15 sites. It is unmanageable at 50 people across 30 sites.
The Employment Rights Act is the headline, but two additional compliance pressures are hitting cleaning companies in 2026.
COSHH (Control of Substances Hazardous to Health) assessments remain among the most commonly inadequate documents found during HSE inspections. A single company was fined £3.8 million for COSHH breaches in 2026. Cleaning companies that use chemical products must maintain risk assessments, Safety Data Sheets, training records, and incident logs. Assessments must be updated whenever new products are introduced or working practices change. For commercial cleaning contracts, COSHH compliance is typically a contractual requirement from the client.
The Digital Waste Tracking Service goes mandatory for permitted waste receiving sites in October 2026. Cleaning companies that generate commercial waste (chemical waste, contaminated materials, significant trade waste) will eventually need to participate in the digital tracking system as waste producers and carriers. Paper waste transfer notes are being replaced with electronic submissions. This does not require immediate software changes for most cleaning companies, but it is on the horizon.
For a sole trader or small domestic cleaning business with a handful of staff, the Employment Rights Act changes can be managed with a combination of scheduling software (ServiceM8 or ZenMaid) and careful manual processes. For our guide to software for sole traders, see the sole trader cleaning software guide.
Bespoke makes sense when the manual overhead becomes unsustainable:
The Employment Rights Act is not going away. The zero-hours reforms are coming. The same legislation is reshaping other labour-intensive sectors: recruitment agencies face new umbrella company liability and ICO compliance requirements under the same Act. The cleaning companies that build compliance into their operational software now will spend less time on admin, less money on penalties, and less energy worrying about whether they missed something in a spreadsheet.