Start logging hours now. The Employment Rights Act 2025 will require employers to offer guaranteed hours to qualifying zero-hours and low-hours staff based on a reference period the government's preferred option sets at 12 weeks, once regulations are finalised. RotaCloud, Deputy and Planday can all log and report shift hours today, but none currently flags a worker's progress toward that threshold automatically, so the right pick turns on price per head, payroll fit and how many staff you run.
Key pointers
- The 12-week reference period is the government's preferred option, not yet law in regulations; the consultation on it closed on 25 August 2026 and DBT is now drafting the detail.
- The proposed low-hours threshold bringing a contract into scope is 8 to 20 hours a week, still to be confirmed.
- Run a rota system that keeps six years of accurate holiday and leave records now, because that duty already applies from 6 April 2026, ahead of the guaranteed-hours reforms.
- RotaCloud is banded by total employee headcount (from £10 a month for up to five staff); Deputy and Planday charge per person (from £3.25 and £2.99 a user a month).
- None of the three publishes a feature that automatically flags when a worker crosses the reference-period threshold: budget for manual review of the hours reports each produces.
- Check payroll fit before price alone: RotaCloud exports to Sage, PayCaptain and Staffology; Deputy and Planday both connect to widely used UK accounting platforms too.
- Decide your reference point before you buy: a 12-week look-back across your current rota and payroll data will show how many staff would already qualify.
What the guaranteed-hours reforms mean for hospitality rotas
Today, a hospitality employer can keep a worker on a zero-hours contract indefinitely, even if that person has worked regular, near-full-time shifts for months. The Employment Rights Act 2025 changes that. Once the guaranteed-hours right is in force, an employer will have to offer a qualifying worker a contract that reflects the hours they actually worked over a reference period, currently proposed at 12 weeks. The worker can turn the offer down and stay on their existing arrangement if they prefer, and the reforms extend to agency workers too, with the hirer usually responsible for the offer.
None of this is retrospective law yet. The Act itself sets out the right in principle; the reference period, the low-hours threshold and the notice-and-cancellation-pay rules all depend on secondary regulations that the Department for Business and Trade is still drafting after a consultation that closed on 25 August 2026. Implementation is expected from 2027. That gap between "the principle is law" and "the detail is confirmed" is exactly why waiting to buy a system until the regulations land is the wrong call for most small hospitality operators: by the time the rules are final, you will need 12 weeks of clean rota data behind you, not 12 weeks still to collect.
For a small pub, café or restaurant running mostly zero-hours or low-hours staff, the practical question is simpler than the legislation: can your current rota tool tell you, for each individual, how many hours they worked in the last 12 weeks, split by role and site if you have more than one? A whiteboard or a WhatsApp group cannot answer that reliably. A dedicated rota platform can, provided you are actually using its time-and-attendance or scheduled-hours reporting rather than just publishing shifts. If you are not yet sure whether your business needs dedicated software at all rather than a general HR tool, Compare the Cloud's guide to HR software for small business sets out when the complexity is worth it.
How the reference period and threshold are shaping up
The Department for Business and Trade's options assessment, published alongside the August 2026 consultation, sets out the government's preferred position clearly: a 12-week initial reference period, followed by further 12-week reference periods once the first is complete, and a low-hours threshold somewhere between 8 and 20 hours a week for contracts that guarantee some hours but not many. A worker on a true zero-hours contract, or on a contract below whatever threshold is finally set, qualifies for the right once they have worked during the reference period, met a regularity requirement still to be defined, and are not covered by any exclusion set out in the regulations.
Two things follow for a hospitality rota. First, hours worked, not hours contracted, is what counts, so a rota system's real value is in its time-and-attendance or worked-hours reporting, not just its shift-planning view. Second, because the threshold and regularity rules are not fixed, a system that can filter and export hours by individual over a rolling period will cope with whatever the final regulations say, while one that only shows a snapshot rota will not.
Shift notice and cancellation pay sit alongside guaranteed hours in the same reforms. Employers will have to give "reasonable notice" of a shift or a change to one, and pay compensation, proportionate to the notice given, if they cancel, curtail or move a shift at short notice. Neither the notice period nor the compensation amount is fixed yet. In the meantime, the government's own research, cited in its zero-hours factsheet, found that 59% of variable-hours workers already get less than a week's notice of a shift, and 13% get less than 24 hours, which gives a sense of how far current hospitality practice sits from where the reforms are heading.
Pricing and cost model
Assumptions: the figures below are each vendor's own published UK list price as read from its site on 29 September 2026, exclude VAT and any add-ons, and assume the entry-level tier for a small team. RotaCloud prices by a flat fee per employee band rather than strictly per head; Deputy and Planday price per user.
| Vendor | Entry plan | Price | Billing basis | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| RotaCloud | Standard | £10 a month (£120 a year) | Flat fee, covers 1 to 5 employees, billed annually to get that rate | Pro tier is £15 a month for the same band; add-ons for Time & Attendance from £4.50 and SMS notifications from £2 |
| Deputy | Lite | £3.25 a user a month | Per user, billed annually (10% off the monthly rate) | £20 a month minimum spend per invoice on Lite, Core and Pro; Core is £4.25 and Pro is £6.50 a user a month |
| Planday | Starter | From £2.99 a user a month | Per user, minimum 5 users | Plus is £3.99 a user a month plus a £30 monthly subscription fee, minimum 10 users, and adds leave management and payroll integrations; Pro is priced on application and adds auto-scheduling |
For a five-person zero-hours team, the entry-tier monthly cost works out at £10 for RotaCloud's banded Standard plan, £16.25 for Deputy Lite (5 x £3.25), and £14.95 for Planday Starter (5 x £2.99, its published minimum team size). RotaCloud's advantage narrows or disappears once a site runs past five staff, because its per-band pricing for larger teams sits behind an on-page calculator rather than a published table; get a quote for your actual headcount before comparing further. None of the three publishes a price for reading or exporting 12-week hours history specifically: that reporting is bundled into the core plan for all three, so it does not add to the monthly cost once you have picked a tier.
RotaCloud vs Deputy vs Planday for guaranteed-hours tracking
| Criteria | RotaCloud | Deputy | Planday |
|---|---|---|---|
| Company background | UK-built, support team based in York | Global scheduling platform | Danish-founded, owned by a major accounting-software group since 2021 |
| Entry price | From £10 a month, up to 5 staff | From £3.25 a user a month | From £2.99 a user a month, min 5 users |
| Hours reporting for a reference period | Compares scheduled vs worked hours, labour-cost and attendance reports | Automatic time tracking across shifts and sites, with reporting that pulls hours and notice-compliance data together | Time and attendance records feeding into combined scheduling, attendance and pay reports |
| Shift-offer and notice audit trail | Time-stamped shift, change and attendance records with one-click reports | Timestamps shift offers and logs worker responses; configurable notice-period rules flag changes inside a set window | Centralised holiday, leave and pay records described as audit-ready for Fair Work Agency inspection |
| Payroll integrations | Sage export, PayCaptain, Staffology | Payroll and HR integrations from the Lite tier | Accounting and payroll partner integrations, including its parent company |
| Best suited to | A single-site or small multi-site UK operator wanting a flat monthly fee under five staff | An operator that wants configurable notice-window flags and is comfortable with per-user pricing as headcount grows | An operator wanting revenue-linked labour-cost reporting as standard |
None of the three should be read as "Employment Rights Act ready" in the sense of doing the compliance work for you. What they do today is keep the underlying data, hours worked, shift offers, notice given, changes made, in a system you can search and export, rather than in a manager's memory or a WhatsApp thread. Deputy's own guide to scheduling zero-hour workers is the clearest of the three vendors' published material on tracking cumulative hours toward a reference-period threshold, and describes configurable notice-period rules that flag a shift change inside a defined window; RotaCloud's own compliance guide and Planday's own April 2026 law-changes article both lean on after-the-fact labour-cost and holiday reports rather than an in-the-moment notice flag. If notice-window compliance is your biggest worry, check that specific capability with Deputy directly. If cost for a small, stable team under five people matters most, RotaCloud's flat fee is the cheapest of the three at that size, and its payroll integrations cover Sage, PayCaptain and Staffology.
Editorial analysis
The safest reading of where this legislation stands is that the principle, guaranteed hours based on a reference period, is settled, while the mechanics, exactly 12 weeks, exactly which threshold, exactly how much notice, are not. A hospitality operator does not need to wait for the mechanics to start behaving as if the reference period were already running. Whatever the final threshold turns out to be, a business that can already show 12 clean weeks of hours-worked data for every zero-hours and low-hours staff member will be in a far stronger position than one that has to reconstruct it from memory and old rotas once the regulations are confirmed. That argues for treating this as a data-hygiene project now, not a software feature to wait for later.
Sources
- Employment Rights Act 2025: overview factsheet - Department for Business and Trade
- Reforms of zero hours and similar contracts - Department for Business and Trade
- Right to guaranteed hours: options assessment - Department for Business and Trade
- Consultation on ending one-sided flexibility: reforms of zero hours and similar contracts - Department for Business and Trade
- Fair Work Agency enforcement statement - gov.uk
- The Fair Work Agency's first delivery plan - Lewis Silkin
- National Living Wage increases to £12.71 per hour - gov.uk
- RotaCloud pricing - RotaCloud
- RotaCloud integrations - RotaCloud
- The Employment Rights Act is here: 6 changes you need to act on - RotaCloud
- Deputy UK pricing - Deputy
- Zero-Hour Contract Scheduling UK: How To Lower Compliance Risks - Deputy
- Planday pricing and plans - Planday
- Planday to be acquired by Xero - Planday
- The April 2026 employment law changes every shift-working business needs to be on top of - Planday
- HR software for small business, do you need it and what to choose
