17% of UK employers expect the Employment Rights Act 2025 to raise their costs “to a large extent”. In social care that rises to 31%, and in hospitality to 28%, according to CIPD’s Winter 2025/26 Labour Market Outlook. The Act touches every employer, but it doesn’t land evenly.
There’s no single answer to which industries are most affected, because the Act isn’t a single change. Acas lists a package of reforms phased across 2026 and 2027, each hitting different sectors. The harassment duty starts on 30 October, and the unfair dismissal, fire and rehire and zero-hours changes follow in 2027.
This piece can’t tell HR teams which industries are already showing up in tribunals. Acas’s quarterly data breaks cases down by track and outcome, not by industry. It does show a system under growing pressure:
- Individual worker-led early conciliation cases rose from 31,893 in January to March 2025 to 39,822 a year later, an increase of around 25%
- Open-track cases, which Acas defines as the most legally complex, with at least one discrimination or disclosure jurisdiction, made up around 58% of tribunal claim forms in January to March 2026
Most of the new rights haven’t started yet, and case law can’t exist before they do. So this piece measures exposure, not tribunal outcomes, and sorts it by provision so HR teams can find their own sector quickly.
Explore: Employment Law Changes 2026: HR Guidance on the Employment Rights Act 2025, for the full picture this piece sits within.
Zero-Hours and Guaranteed Hours: Five Sectors Carry Most of It
The zero-hours reforms are the clearest case of a sector-specific impact, because the workforce they cover is so concentrated. GOV.UK’s factsheet puts the number at around 1.2 million people, roughly 3.6% of UK employment, and names where they cluster:
- Hospitality
- Retail and wholesale
- Transport
- Arts and other services
- Health and social care
Brabners, in guidance published by UKHospitality, says hospitality depends on flexible labour more than most sectors.
The problem the reforms target is just as specific. According to the same factsheet, citing Living Wage Foundation research, 59% of variable hours workers get less than a week’s notice of their shifts, and 13% get less than 24 hours. The new rights respond directly: guaranteed hours, reasonable notice of shifts, and payment when a shift is cancelled at short notice. Agency workers are covered too, and the factsheet estimates around 900,000 people work in temporary agency jobs, about 140,000 of them also on zero-hours arrangements.
On timing, Acas lists these changes under 2027 and notes the government hasn’t yet said when in the year they land. The consultation on the details closed on 25 August 2026, so for now this is preparation, not a compliance deadline.
Explore: Guaranteed Hours & Cancelled Shift Pay: What We Know So Far, for how the three rights work and what’s still undecided.
Cost Pressure: Where Employers Expect It to Hurt
Cost is where employers have been most direct about the Act’s impact. CIPD’s survey of 2,082 senior HR professionals and decision-makers found 74% expect the Act to increase their employment costs, and the headline figures above show where the pressure concentrates: social care and hospitality.
CIPD doesn’t explain the gap. The government’s own data points to one thing the two sectors share: pay close to the legal minimum.
- Social care: the median hourly rate for care workers in March 2025 was £12.00, just 56p above the National Living Wage at the time, according to GOV.UK’s social care factsheet
- Hospitality: the Department for Business and Trade’s fire and rehire assessment uses hospitality as its example of a sector with median wages close to the National Living Wage
Whether that is why these two sectors expect the biggest hit is an inference, not something either source states. The same Brabners guidance points the same way, saying that for operators already working within tight margins, cancellation payments could be among the most impactful elements of the reforms. It is a place to start looking, not a measured result.
37% plan to hire fewer permanent staff because of the reforms, which CIPD warns could push employers toward temporary workers and self-employed contractors. These are employer expectations from a survey, not measured outcomes.
Explore: Recruitment & Employment Strategy Under the New Act, for the full hiring-chill data and what employers are doing instead.
Third-Party Harassment: Where Staff Face the Public
From 30 October 2026, employers become liable for harassment of their staff by third parties, such as customers or clients, unless they took all reasonable steps to prevent it. Exposure is likely to be greatest where staff spend their working day dealing with the public.
For the economy as a whole, ONS data cited in GOV.UK’s harassment factsheet gives a baseline: 5.2% of people who experienced sexual harassment in the year to March 2025 said it came from a client or member of the public they met through work. Two sectors publish more detailed figures.
Healthcare. The 2025 NHS Staff Survey found that, from patients, relatives or other members of the public in the previous 12 months:
- 25.25% of NHS staff experienced harassment, bullying or abuse
- 9.26% experienced discrimination, a five-year high
- 52.07% of ambulance staff experienced harassment, bullying or abuse, and 31.05% experienced unwanted sexual behaviour
This is a self-reported survey covering 751,088 responses from staff at 206 NHS trusts in England, with a 49% response rate.
Retail. The British Retail Consortium’s Crime Report 2026 recorded 1,600 incidents of violence and abuse a day against retail workers in 2024/25, down by a fifth but still the second highest on record, against 455 a day before the pandemic. That is the retail trade body’s annual crime survey of retailers, and the report is sponsored by Sensormatic Solutions.
Hospitality has no comparable published figure that this piece could verify, so it isn’t ranked here. That is a gap in the data, not evidence of lower risk.
Two cautions apply. These surveys count abuse and violence, and not all of it would amount to harassment in the legal sense, because third-party liability covers harassment related to seven protected characteristics: age, disability, gender reassignment, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation. And exposure is not liability, since an employer that took all reasonable steps has a defence.
Explore: What a Tribunal Will Look For, and How Little Time Is Left to Prepare It, for what “all reasonable steps” is likely to mean in practice.
Sectors the Act Names Directly
Most of the Act applies across the economy. A handful of provisions are written for specific sectors.
Adult social care: a sector-wide pay process. The Act gives ministers powers to set up Fair Pay Agreements, negotiated by bodies of employer and worker representatives, to set minimum pay, terms and conditions across the sector. GOV.UK’s factsheet describes it as similar to national-level collective bargaining, and says agreements can raise standards but not lower them.
- The powers cover England, Scotland and Wales: adult social care in England, and adult and children’s social care in Scotland and Wales
- England’s workforce was 1.50 million in 2024/25, and the factsheet, citing the Resolution Foundation, puts union membership among frontline care workers at around 20%, against 41% across the economy
- Acas lists the new negotiating body as starting in October 2026, with the first agreement expected to take effect in 2028
Seafarers. Acas lists new regulations in December 2026 setting higher standards for health and safety, pay, job security and rest breaks, with collective redundancy protection extending in 2027 to workers on ships that regularly operate from British ports but are registered outside Great Britain.
Tipping: a consultation duty.
- By the end of 2026, Acas says, employers will have to consult workers before creating or reviewing a tipping policy, share an anonymised summary of the feedback, and review the policy at least every three years
- The GOV.UK consultation on the revised code closed on 29 September 2026 and names no sector, but the Institute of Hospitality covers the change as a hospitality one
Agencies and umbrella companies. In 2027, Acas says, the legal definition of an agency will expand to include umbrella companies, allowing the relevant bodies to enforce. Lewis Silkin adds that the outcome of the government’s consultation is still awaited.
Fire and Rehire: The Reform That Isn’t Sector-Specific
After the sector-by-sector picture above, fire and rehire is the exception. The Department for Business and Trade’s assessment draws on a 2022 YouGov survey and found:
- An estimated 12,100 employers use fire and rehire each year, under 1% of all employers, affecting around 125,000 workers
- Slight sector variation, with information and communication the most likely to use it, though the assessment describes the difference as small
- No significant differences by region
The survey is unpublished and covers 2020 to 2022, so the assessment says its estimates are likely to run high.
What decides exposure is the contract term, not the industry. From January 2027, Acas confirms, dismissing someone and re-engaging them on worse terms becomes automatically unfair in most cases. The DBT assessment lists the protected terms: pay, pay-linked measures such as commission, pensions, total hours and leave, plus shift patterns still being specified. Any employer that wants to change those without agreement is caught, whatever its sector.
One pressure point is closer to sector-specific: shift patterns. The assessment estimates 27,000 workers a year are affected by fire and rehire over shift changes. It says the government is minded to protect changes between day and night working, and between weekday and weekend working, and the final list is still awaited, so employers who run shift rotas should watch for it.
Explore: Fire and Rehire Reforms: What “Automatically Unfair” Really Means, for the full list of restricted variations, the narrow financial exception and who the reform protects.
What Employers in the Most Exposed Sectors Should Do Now
Start with the group that matches the sector. Most of these steps can be taken before the rules land.
- Zero-hours-heavy sectors: start recording the hours people actually work week to week, check how far ahead shifts are published, and agree who makes guaranteed hours offers and pays cancellations where agency workers are used
- Customer-facing sectors: before 30 October, run a risk assessment that covers harassment by customers, patients and visitors, check that reporting routes work when the person responsible isn’t an employee, and train, and keep a record of, the managers who will hear about incidents first
- Adult social care: prepare for sector-wide pay and terms set through the new negotiating body, which Acas says is due to start in October 2026, and model what a higher pay floor could mean for costs
- Tips, agencies and umbrella arrangements: draft the tipping consultation process now, knowing the final code is still to come, and review contracts with umbrella companies ahead of regulation in 2027
- Every sector: review variation clauses covering pay, hours, pensions and leave before January 2027, since Burges Salmon explains that imposing a new one will itself be a restricted variation, though existing clauses, and those in new hires’ contracts, still appear to be permitted. And keep records that can be retrieved later, since the tribunal time limit has doubled to six months for problems arising on or after 1 October 2026
How Avado Can Help
An Act that arrives in phases, and lands differently on each sector, rewards the HR teams that can tell which parts apply to them and prepare early. Avado’s HR Compliance for Managers course, presented by employment law specialist Amanda Chadwick, builds that judgement. It covers the Employment Rights Act 2025 changes as they land, including the ones still being finalised.
Explore HR Compliance for Managers and make sure the right people in every part of the business know what is coming for their sector!
