Records — the burden has shifted
Post-CJEU CCOO and the King v Sash Windows aftermath, the practical position is that the employer must be able to produce hours-worked records on request. 'We don't track it' is no longer a defence. Workforce-attendance systems are the standard answer; spreadsheets and manual returns are no longer credible at scale. The shift is most visible in employment-tribunal cases where the burden of proof on working-time questions has effectively moved from the worker to the employer when no records exist.
Holiday pay calculations
The 52-week reference period is now embedded in HMRC guidance and supported by extensive case law. Regular overtime, commission and shift premia feed into the calculation. Payroll teams that pull this data manually each quarter waste days they don't have, and introduce errors that surface in tribunal claims years later. The integration of time data into payroll is the only sustainable answer; the manual workaround does not scale and does not survive an audit.
Worker status and gig models
The Uber and Pimlico Plumbers lines of cases continue to widen what counts as a 'worker'. If your model uses self-employed contractors who in practice work fixed shifts under your direction, get the contracts and the time records reviewed. The 2026 position is broadly that substance trumps form: a contractor with a contract calling them self-employed, working alongside employees doing the same tasks, on the same shifts, is highly exposed to a worker-status reclassification, with retrospective holiday-pay and working-time exposure.
Rolled-up holiday pay — partially restored for irregular workers
After the Pimlico Plumbers ruling banned rolled-up holiday pay broadly, the Department for Business has restored it for 'irregular hours' and 'part-year' workers from April 2024. The 12.07% uplift can be paid alongside the hours rather than as a separate payment, but only for the qualifying worker categories. Misapplying rolled-up holiday pay to regular full-time workers is a non-compliance issue; correctly applying it to irregular workers is a useful simplification.
Carry-over of statutory leave
Statutory leave that an employee was unable to take due to sickness or family leave can be carried over. The post-Brexit retained law framework has tightened the carry-over rules but the principle survives. Time and absence systems should track carry-over explicitly; relying on year-end reconciliation produces errors that compound.
Practical operational implications
For a typical 200-employee UK business in 2026: time recording must be system-based and complete; payroll must integrate with the time system for holiday-pay calculation; the 48-hour opt-out (where used) must be current and reviewable; the worker-status of any contractor population must be documented and defensible. None of this is new in principle, but the enforcement environment is now strict enough that 'best efforts' is no longer the standard.
What to do this quarter
Run a working-time audit: pull a sample week of time data per department, reconcile to payroll, and check that the records can be produced on demand. The audit takes a day and surfaces 80% of the practical exposure. Operators who run this audit annually face few unpleasant surprises; operators who do not, find out the hard way.
The Regulations are stable; the enforcement environment is not. Records are your defence — make them automatic, integrate them with payroll, and the compliance picture mostly takes care of itself.