What will guaranteed hours cost you?
From 2027 you have to offer a guaranteed hours contract to every worker whose hours have settled into a pattern. You make the offer. They never have to ask for it, and a refusal only restarts the clock.
No sign up. The calculator runs the same engine our paying customers use.
Nobody can tell you yet, and that is the point
The Act sets the duty. The regulations set the numbers, and the regulations aren't written. The consultation closed in August 2026 and six parameters are still open. Each one changes the answer, and two of them change it by thousands of pounds a head.
Twelve weeks. Seven quiet weeks of eight hours, then five weeks of twenty covering a vacancy. Nothing about the rota changes below. Only the rule does.
| If the regulations say | Guaranteed | Cost a year |
|---|---|---|
| Average the weeks they worked | 13.0 hrs | £8,592 |
| Take the middle week instead | 8.0 hrs | £5,287 |
| Week | Hours worked |
|---|---|
| 1 | 8.0 |
| 2 | 8.0 |
| 3 | 8.0 |
| 4 | 8.0 |
| 5 | 8.0 |
| 6 | 8.0 |
| 7 | 8.0 |
| 8 | 20.0 |
| 9 | 20.0 |
| 10 | 20.0 |
| 11 | 20.0 |
| 12 | 20.0 |
For one worker, from one undecided word. Multiply by everyone on your rota who looks like this.
Three duties, not one
Guaranteed hours
Offer a contract covering the hours a worker regularly works, measured over a reference period. Repeat it on a rolling basis if they refuse.
Reasonable notice of shifts
Tell people far enough ahead. What counts as reasonable is one of the undecided parameters, and it may well be a week.
Cancellation pay
Pay something when you cancel, move or cut short a shift at short notice. The tiers aren't set. A sliding scale is likely.
About 1.2 million people in the UK are on a contract that doesn't guarantee a minimum number of hours, up 55,000 over the year and close to the highest it has ever been (ONS, August 2026). Most of them work for somebody who has not yet counted.
Six things nobody has decided
Each of these is a blank in the regulations. Each one changes who qualifies, or how much they are owed, or both. The rules page tracks where each one currently stands.
| The blank | Range on the table | What it decides |
|---|---|---|
| Reference period | 12, 26 or 52 weeks | How far back you look, and so how much a seasonal spike counts |
| Minimum weeks worked | 6 to 12 weeks | Whether occasional cover staff are in or out |
| Low hours threshold | 8 to 48 hours a week | Which contracts count as low hours at all |
| Excess hours trigger | None, or 48 to 96 hours | Whether a second hurdle applies on top of the pattern |
| Mean or median | Either | The single biggest lever on the final number |
| Adjustment margin | None, fixed hours, or a percentage | How much room you have to settle without recalculating |
We don't hardcode any of these. Every one is a setting, so the day the regulations publish we change six values rather than rewriting the product. Until then you can run your rota against all of them.
Groups running five to fifty sites
Care homes first, then hospitality, retail, security and contract cleaning. Anywhere a rota moves week to week and a real person is deciding who covers what.
The common shape is an operations or HR lead who already knows this is coming, has been asked by a board what it will cost, and has no way to answer. They usually suspect the number is large. It often is not. What catches people out is not the total but where it sits: one site, a handful of names, and a pattern nobody had looked at as a pattern before.
If you employ fewer than twenty people and run one rota, you probably do not need software for this. Use the free calculator and keep the printout.
Two products, one engine
Exposure report
Send us twelve weeks of hours. We tell you how many guaranteed hours contracts you would owe, to whom, at what cost, under every version of the rules still on the table. You get the working, not just a total.
Compliance engine
Runs continuously. Issues offers on time, watches shift notice, calculates cancellation pay, and holds the six year audit trail a tribunal will ask for.
We run the first one for you
Get us twelve weeks of hours in whatever your rota system exports. A CSV is fine. A spreadsheet somebody maintains by hand is fine too, and more common than anyone admits.
We run the first report ourselves rather than making you fight an importer. You can run them yourself afterwards. From 2027 it runs on its own.
If your data only has scheduled hours rather than hours actually worked, we'll say so on the front page of the report. The statutory test is hours worked, and quietly treating one as the other is the fastest way to get every number wrong.
