My employee resigned in the middle of a disciplinary. What now?

4th September 2026

The letter arrives the night before the hearing, and the first feeling is relief. The problem has removed itself. Nobody has to sit in a room and say difficult things out loud.

Then the second thought arrives, which is that you have no idea whether you are allowed to stop.

Here is the short version. You cannot refuse the resignation. You can usually finish the process, and in most cases you should. And the real risk in front of you is not the disciplinary at all, it is what the resignation letter says about why they are going.

You cannot reject it

Acas is blunt about this. “You cannot reject an employee’s resignation.” Resigning is something the employee does, not something you agree to. Telling them you will not accept it changes nothing except the tone of the claim that follows.

What you can do is confirm it in writing, the same day. Set out the last working day, what happens to outstanding holiday, and whether you still expect them at the hearing. Acas calls responding in writing good practice. Treat it as the minimum.

If the resignation came in the heat of an argument, pause. Acas notes that someone might not genuinely want to resign, and that a sudden decision can be affected by something else going on, such as a health condition or a bereavement. Give it a day and ask them to confirm in writing. You are not obliged to let somebody take a resignation back, but refusing twenty minutes after a shouting match is the kind of fact a tribunal enjoys.

Work out whether they still work for you

Everything else turns on this, so settle it first.

If they resigned with notice, they are still your employee until that notice runs out. The statutory minimum an employee must give is one week, once they have been there a month, and their contract may require more. Nothing has changed during that period. They are employed, you are paying them, and the process can continue as planned.

If they walked out and gave no notice, they are gone. Acas puts it plainly: an employee who does not give enough notice, where you have not agreed something else with them, is likely to be in breach of contract. That is a claim you almost certainly will not bring, but it does mean the employment has ended, and you cannot dismiss somebody who no longer works for you.

If they are working notice, finish it

The instinct is to let it drop. Resist it, for three reasons.

The first is the people still in the building. If somebody raised the complaint or gave a statement, they need to see that it was taken seriously. Stopping the moment the subject resigns teaches everyone that resigning is how you make a complaint disappear.

The second is that an unfinished process is an unanswerable question later. Asked in nine months what you concluded, “we never finished it” is a worse answer than a finding either way.

The third is that resigning with notice does not stop you dismissing during that notice if the evidence takes you there. Where the conduct is that serious, the difference between having resigned and having been dismissed matters, to a regulator and to whoever asks you for a reference.

One trap catches people out. If you had already given notice of dismissal and they resigned before it expired, the law still treats that as a dismissal by you. Resigning does not tidy away a dismissal that has already happened.

Keep the hearing proportionate. If they choose not to attend, you can decide on the evidence you have, and you should say in the invitation that you will.

If they have already gone, finish the investigation instead

You cannot reach a disciplinary outcome against somebody who is no longer employed, because every outcome available to you is something you do to an employee.

You can still finish the investigation, and you should. Write up what the evidence showed. Record that the process was not concluded because the employee resigned, and the date they did. Do not record a sanction you were never entitled to impose, and never write “would have been dismissed” in the file. That sentence gets read back to you.

The risk is the resignation letter, not the disciplinary

Read the letter again, this time for what it accuses you of rather than for how it made you feel.

If they say they are leaving because of how they have been treated, you may be looking at a constructive dismissal claim. Section 95(1)(c) treats an employee as dismissed where they end the contract because of the employer’s conduct, in circumstances entitling them to go without notice. Acas describes it as resigning because the employer has seriously breached the contract.

Two things follow from that.

Their clock is short, for now. Most claims currently run for three months minus one day, and for constructive dismissal that counts from the last day of notice, or from the resignation itself if they gave none. From 1st October 2026 it becomes six months, with 9th November 2026 for breach of contract claims in Scotland. So a resignation handed in this month could still be argued about well into next spring, and your notes have to survive that.

Length of service matters, for now. Ordinary unfair dismissal, constructive or otherwise, needs two years of service, although discrimination and whistleblowing claims need none. That changes on 1st January 2027, when the qualifying period drops to six months and the cap on the compensatory award goes. Our piece on the January change sets out what that means in practice.

If the letter blames the process itself, and particularly if the process began right after you raised performance or conduct, the sequence of events is what a tribunal will look at hardest. That is the pattern in our piece on being signed off with stress after a performance conversation.

Pay them properly, especially now

This is where careful employers lose cases they should have won.

Pay the notice they work. Pay accrued holiday they have not taken, which is a statutory payment on termination rather than something you decide. And do not dock pay for notice they failed to work unless your contract expressly lets you: under section 13 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 a deduction needs statutory authority, a written term in the contract, or their agreement in writing given beforehand.

An unlawful deduction is a cheap claim with no qualifying period. Do not hand one over on the way out.

The reference question

You will get the call. You do not usually have to give a reference at all unless you agreed in writing to do so, or you are in a regulated sector such as financial services. If you do give one it must be fair and accurate, and gov.uk confirms it can be brief: job title, salary and the dates.

Brief is the right answer here. An unproven allegation is not a fact about somebody’s performance, and describing an investigation you never concluded is how a reference becomes a defamation problem. Confirm the dates and stop.

What to do on Monday

Confirm the resignation in writing, with the last working day and what you expect before then.

Decide whether the process continues, and write down why. If they are working notice it usually should. If they have gone, finish the investigation and close the file with the reason it stopped where it did.

Read the resignation letter for allegations rather than tone. If it makes any, treat them as a grievance and answer them. Under section 207A of the 1992 Act a tribunal can raise an award by up to 25 per cent where an employer unreasonably fails to follow the Acas Code, and ignoring a grievance because its author has left is exactly that.

Work out the final pay figure today, holiday included, and diary the payment.

Then keep all of it. The file you build this week is the file you will be reading from next spring.

Tarn.hr provides HR guidance based on UK employment law and Acas codes of practice. It does not constitute legal advice and should not be relied upon as such. Employment law is complex and turns on the facts of each case. For any situation involving significant legal risk, potential tribunal claims, or matters of particular sensitivity, you should seek advice from a qualified employment solicitor. Tarn.hr is not responsible for any decisions made on the basis of its guidance.