What employment law changes should UK employers prepare for in 2026?

The scale of employment law change now approaching UK employers is difficult to overstate.

I recently downloaded a checklist summarising the changes expected under the Employment Rights Act 2025. It contained around 85 separate developments, with 27 identified as “high-risk” for SMEs.

Alongside that, I reviewed a separate sexual harassment compliance checklist linked to the strengthened preventative duty under the Worker Protection (Amendment of Equality Act 2010) Act 2023 and the further changes expected under the 2025 Act.

That checklist alone asked employers to assess themselves against 32 separate preventative measures. If many organisations answered those questions with complete honesty, the results would probably make uncomfortable reading.

What makes this more than a compliance exercise is the convergence of three pressures.

First, many of the changes under the 2025 Act involve not just procedural adjustments but real additional costs and operational burdens for employers.

Second, the strengthened harassment duty raises the bar from reacting to incidents to actively proving preventative steps were in place.

Third, the emergence of AI-driven claimant firms means employers may increasingly face large, multi-ground “scatter-gun” claims generated at scale and designed to force commercial settlements.

Taken together, the combination looks less like a wave of reform and more like a perfect employment law tsunami for SMEs. It may be an interesting time to be an employment law specialist — but it could be a very challenging one to be an unprepared business owner.