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.
Connect with us about cleaning company software · · Replies within 24 hours
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.
Here is what that means day to day. A cleaner telephones in sick. Your system must work out the SSP from day one, record the absence, and carry the change into payroll. 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. Cleaning companies hire often, and staff leave often. Every new person now has leave rights from the first day, and your system must follow them.
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.
Here is what that means for you. A cleaner works 20 hours a week, across three client sites, for 12 weeks. You must then offer them a contract that guarantees 20 hours a week. If they accept, you are committed to providing (and paying for) those hours, even if a client cancels.
An employer must give reasonable notice of a shift time. 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. You may dismiss a cleaner in their first year for poor work. You must now show written evidence of three things. The problem. The help you gave. The steps you 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. Keep an audit trail |
| Unfair dismissal protection | January 2027 | Performance records, absence tracking, training logs, disciplinary timeline. All timestamped and retrievable per employee |
Connect with us about cleaning company software · · Replies within 24 hours
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.
Most cleaning companies now do this by hand. They record the hours in the scheduling tool. They export a spreadsheet. They work out the SSP and the reference periods themselves. They then type the answers 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 more sets of rules are now reaching 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. A cleaning company that uses chemicals must keep 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. Some cleaning companies produce commercial waste. That means chemical waste, contaminated material, or a large amount of trade waste. They will have to join the digital tracking system, both as producers and as 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.
The Employment Rights Act is one Act. Day-one SSP, the 12-week reference period, the guaranteed-hours offer and the notice rules apply to every cleaning company in the same way.
Yet every company must now build its own answer. A spreadsheet each, or a consultant each, or a wait for a vendor that serves several trades and will reach cleaning last. The sector pays for the same work hundreds of times, and most of those answers will be wrong in the same places.
We build the other way. A worker, a shift, an absence, an hours record and a reference period are declared once. They sit in a foundation that every cleaning company system uses. The rule is written once. Every company still owns its own system, and every one has the rule on the same day.
We explain how a whole sector shares one foundation in bespoke software for a whole sector. We give the cost in what does it cost to own and run your own systems.
A sole trader, or a small domestic business with a few staff, can manage these changes. Use scheduling software such as ServiceM8 or ZenMaid, and careful work by hand. 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. Put compliance into your working software now. You will spend less time on admin, and less money on penalties. You will also stop worrying about what a spreadsheet missed.