Quick question, and it is worth answering honestly before you read on.
How long does someone have to work for a company before they can take it to a tribunal for unfair dismissal?
If you said two years, you are right — until 31 December 2026. From 1 January 2027 the answer is six months. Most people on both sides of the desk are working from an understanding of their position that is about to go out of date, and a fair few were hazy on it to begin with.
Here is the whole thing in plain English.
Where things stand today
At the moment, an employee needs two years of continuous service before they can bring an ordinary unfair dismissal claim.
Before those two years are up, an employer can end the employment without having to prove much at all. They need to give the notice set out in the contract (or the statutory minimum, which is one week once someone has been there a month), and that is broadly it. No requirement to show a fair reason. No requirement to follow a fair process.
That surprises a lot of people. Salespeople in particular often assume that a written warning, a formal review or a performance plan is something they are entitled to. In the first two years, generally, it is not.
There are important exceptions, and they apply from day one already:
- Discrimination — dismissal because of age, sex, race, disability, religion, sexual orientation, pregnancy or maternity.
- Whistleblowing — dismissal for raising genuine concerns about wrongdoing.
- Asserting a statutory right — for example, being dismissed for insisting on holiday pay or the minimum wage.
- Trade union activity, or raising health and safety concerns.
None of those require any length of service. They never have.
What changes, and when
Three dates matter.
1 October 2026. The window for bringing most tribunal claims doubles, from three months to six months.
30 October 2026. Employers take on a stronger duty to prevent harassment, including harassment by third parties. If your sales team spends its life at trade shows, on client sites and at hospitality events, that is your world, not head office’s.
1 January 2027. The main one. Three things happen at once:
- The unfair dismissal qualifying period falls from two years to six months.
- The cap on compensation is removed entirely. Today, a payout for unfair dismissal is limited to the lower of £123,543 or 52 weeks’ gross pay. From January there is no ceiling; a tribunal simply works out what the person actually lost.
- Dismissing someone and rehiring them on worse terms becomes automatically unfair in most cases.
Two details that catch people out.
It applies to people who are already in the job. This is not a rule that only affects new hires. Anyone who has six months’ service on 1 January 2027 is protected from that day. In practice, if someone started with you before roughly the beginning of July this year, they are covered on New Year’s Day.
It is not a proposal. The government originally wanted protection from day one, lost that argument in the House of Lords, and settled on six months. There will be no further consultation, and changing it again would need a fresh Act of Parliament. It is a date, not a possibility.
What “protected” actually means
This gets mangled in both directions, so it is worth being precise.
Unfair dismissal protection does not mean someone cannot be let go. It means that if they are, the employer needs two things:
- A fair reason — in practice, usually performance, conduct or redundancy.
- A fair process — concerns raised properly, evidence, a chance to respond, a real opportunity to put things right, and a right of appeal.
So if you are an employer worrying that you are stuck with underperformers from month seven, you are not. You can still part company with someone who is not doing the job. You simply have to be able to show your working.
And if you are a salesperson thinking your job is now bulletproof, it is not that either. What you gain is the right to a fair reason and a fair hearing, several months sooner than before. That is genuinely valuable. It is not a guarantee.
Why this is a bigger problem in sales than almost anywhere else
Two things make sales different, and together they matter.
Sales moves more than other functions. Reps change roles more often than engineers, accountants or operations people. Territories get redrawn, commission structures change, a competitor launches something better, a good manager leaves. Movement is a feature of the function, and every sales director already builds for it.
Sales is also unusually hard to hire for. When you bring in a quantity surveyor or a design engineer, a good chunk of what predicts success is verifiable — qualifications, chartership, projects delivered, systems used. You can check it.
Very little of what makes a strong salesperson works that way. What actually predicts performance is resilience when a deal dies at the final hurdle, curiosity about a technical product, the discipline to make the call nobody fancies making on a wet Thursday, and whether a specifier or a buying director enjoys being in a room with them. Character and temperament — the hardest things to evidence on a CV or read reliably in a fifty-minute interview.
Now set that against the calendar. In specification sales into construction, the gap between a first meaningful conversation and an order can run twelve to eighteen months. In capital equipment, six to nine is normal. In commercial renewables, one deal can sit in procurement for two quarters.
Which means the point at which a decision has to be made now arrives before the sales cycle has finished running. The window has narrowed, and what sits inside it was already the hardest thing to measure.
That is not really a legal problem. It is a hiring problem that the law has brought forward.
The conversation both sides tend to avoid
Here is the part that matters most, and it applies equally to whoever is reading.
When a sales hire does not work out inside the first year, it is rarely because someone was dishonest. It is almost always because something that mattered was never said out loud.
The hiring manager knew the territory had been neglected for eighteen months, but worried that saying so plainly would put a good candidate off. The candidate knew they were not going to be happy doing four nights a week away from home indefinitely, but worried that raising it would make them look uncommitted. Both made a reasonable decision in the moment. Both ended up somewhere neither of them wanted to be.
That was always a costly way to hire. From January it costs more, on both sides.
So the single most useful thing either party can do between now and then is get comfortable putting the difficult things on the table early — and treating the other side’s difficult questions as a good sign rather than a red flag.
If you are hiring, be upfront about:
- The real state of the territory or patch. Warm, cold, neglected, or brand new.
- How the year one number was arrived at, and how realistic it is.
- What happened with the last person in the seat, and why.
- Where the product genuinely has references, and where you are asking someone to open a door for the first time.
- What the travel, the reporting and the CRM discipline actually look like week to week.
None of that scares off a good salesperson. A cold patch with an honest brief is an attractive proposition to plenty of strong candidates — they can price it in, plan for it, and back themselves. What loses people is discovering it in month three.
If you are the candidate, be upfront about:
- What is genuinely driving the move, rather than the tidy version.
- What you will and will not do on travel, nights away and geography.
- Where your experience is deep and where it is thinner — a hiring manager who knows you have never sold into main contractors can build a ramp for it. One who assumes you have cannot.
- What you need to earn, and by when.
And ask properly. Nobody has ever lost an offer for asking how the number was built, what the pipeline looks like at each stage, or how probation is reviewed and by whom. A confident employer welcomes those questions, because a candidate asking them is a candidate thinking about the job seriously.
Nobody gets this perfect. Both sides are making a judgement on partial information, and always will be. But the gap between a good hire and an expensive one is usually just a handful of conversations that either happened or did not.
What good employers are doing about it
Practically, the front end of the process is where the work now sits:
Assess for the things that actually predict performance. Not “tell me about a time you overcame an objection”, but real scenarios from your market, with your buyer type, ideally in front of someone who does the job well.
Set milestones that do not depend on closed revenue. By month three you can see whether someone is getting in front of the right people, asking intelligent questions about the product, and building pipeline in the segments you want. None of that needs a signed order, and all of it predicts one.
Make probation shorter than the qualifying period. Three or four months, with a proper review and the option to extend by a month, gives you a decision point with runway left. A six-month probation ending on the day protection begins is not really a probation.
Write things down from week one. Objectives agreed, reviews recorded, concerns raised at the time rather than reconstructed later. Unglamorous — and it is the thing that decides whether a difficult decision is defensible.
Where we come in
Most of the problem is not the information. It is the delivery.
Hiring managers hold back because they are worried honesty will cost them a candidate they want. Candidates hold back because they are worried a direct question will read as difficult, or lack of commitment, or negotiating too early. Both are being sensible, and the result is two people having a slightly careful conversation about a decision that will shape the next few years for both of them.
That is the specific job we do. We ask each side the questions they find hard to ask each other, and then we put the answers in front of the other party properly — with the context that makes them make sense, rather than as a bald fact that lands badly. A patch that has been neglected for two years is a warning sign delivered flatly, and an opportunity delivered with the reasons, the support behind it and the earning potential attached. A candidate who wants to be home four nights a week is a problem in an unexplained line on a CV, and a non-issue once someone explains the shape of their territory and how they plan to cover it.
Neither party has to guess what the other is really thinking, and neither has to risk the relationship to find out. That is difficult to replicate hiring direct — not because anyone is doing it badly, but because it is genuinely hard to be completely candid with someone you are simultaneously trying to impress.
And if a placement does not work out, our replacement guarantee means the client is not paying twice for the same seat.
If you are planning sales headcount for 2027, the useful conversation to have now is not really about employment law. It is whether the conversations you are having at interview are honest enough that six months is long enough to be sure.
This article is general information, not legal advice. For advice on your own contracts, probation policies or dismissal procedures, speak to an employment solicitor.
Written by Derek Anderson, Client Services Director, Sales Recruit UK.