When unfair dismissal protection starts at six months, probation stops being a formality and becomes the process that manages your real risk. How to run…
For more than a decade, probation in a business in England and Wales has been able to be a little casual. With unfair dismissal protection starting at two years, the formal probation period — three months, six months — sat comfortably inside a long window in which an employer could part company with a new hire on a fair-enough basis without much legal exposure. Probation was a management ritual more than a legal safeguard.
From , that changes. The Employment Rights Act 2025 reduces the qualifying period for ordinary unfair dismissal from two years to six months. Suddenly the end of a typical probation period sits at or near the point where unfair dismissal protection switches on. Probation stops being a formality and becomes the process that manages an employer's actual, live risk in the early months of employment. This guide is about how to run it — and how to dismiss fairly when that is the outcome — once the six-month rule is in force.
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