Guaranteed hours and shift notice
Track the hours casual and low-hours cleaners regularly work, record guaranteed-hours offers, and log shift changes with the notice given.
The Employment Rights Act 2025 gives casual, zero-hours and low-hours workers new rights, expected to start in 2027:
- An offer of guaranteed hours that reflects the hours they regularly worked over a reference period. They can say no.
- Reasonable notice of their shifts, and of shifts being changed or cancelled.
- Pay when a shift is cancelled, moved or cut short at short notice.
Who's tracked
Employees and casual or zero-hours staff on your payroll, whose contract guarantees fewer hours a week than your low-hours threshold. Self-employed cleaners aren't covered. Agency workers get similar rights through their agency, so they aren't tracked here.
For each person, open Workers, click Edit details and fill in:
- Guaranteed hours a week: what their contract guarantees. Leave it empty for a zero-hours contract.
- Hourly pay: used to work out cancellation pay. Without it, RotaProof still flags payments but can't give the amount.
The settings
Admins can change these from Guaranteed hours > Settings. The starting values are placeholders taken from the options the government consulted on.
| Setting | Starts at | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Low-hours threshold | 16 hours a week | People guaranteed fewer hours than this are tracked. |
| Reference period | 12 weeks | How many complete weeks of hours are looked at. |
| Reasonable notice of a shift | 7 days | Shifts given or changed with less notice are flagged. |
| Short notice for cancellation pay | 7 days | Cancelling, moving or cutting a shift with less notice means pay is due. The law allows at most 7 days. |
| Cancellation pay | 80% | The share of the pay for the hours lost that's due. |
Offers of guaranteed hours
Guaranteed hours in the menu lists everyone who's tracked. RotaProof adds up the hours they worked in each of the last complete weeks: their clocked hours where there are some, otherwise the planned hours of shifts that have happened. Then it shows the weekly average.
- Offer due: they averaged more than their contract guarantees. The suggested offer is the average, rounded down to the half hour.
- Building up history: they haven't worked for you for a whole reference period yet.
- Waiting for their answer: you've recorded an offer but not their answer.
- Offer made: they've answered. They're looked at again one reference period after the offer.
- Make the offer in writing, the way you normally would.
- Open the person's page from Guaranteed hours, fill in Record an offer and click Record offer.
- When they answer, click Accepted or Declined. If they accept, their guaranteed hours are updated. Remember to give them a new contract.
Click Offers record to download every offer and answer as a spreadsheet.
Shift changes and cancellation pay
While you're on Assured, RotaProof logs every change to an upcoming shift that a tracked cleaner is on: shifts given, cancelled, taken off them, moved, cut short or made longer. Each change records when it was made, by whom, and how much notice they got. Changes to shifts that have already started aren't logged, because those are corrections, not notice.
When you change or delete a shift, RotaProof asks Who asked for this change?. Pay is only worked out for changes you made, not ones the cleaner asked for.
- Cancelled or taken off the shift: all the shift's hours count as lost.
- Moved: the hours of the original shift that the new time doesn't cover count as lost.
- Cut short: the hours cut count as lost.
Open Shift changes to see them. Payments to sort lists the ones where pay is due. Once you've paid, choose Paid and click Save. If you aren't paying, for example because the cleaner agreed to swap, choose Not paying it and write down why. The reason is kept with the record. Click Download for a spreadsheet of every change.
This guide explains how to use RotaProof. It isn't legal advice. For the rules themselves, the Home Office's employer's guide to right to work checks is the final word.