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When notice ends, whether the contract says weeks or months, and whether it gives less than the law allows.
Written for employers. If you are an employee working out your own notice, choose “The employee, resigning” and the dates work the same way, but the rest of this page speaks to the employer.
Employment ends on
Give the two dates and the answer appears here. The calculation runs in your browser, and nothing you type is sent anywhere unless you ask for the result by email.
This is the part employers get wrong, and they get it wrong by doing something reasonable: they read their own contract. A contract saying “one month’s notice on either side” looks generous next to a week, and it is, right up until somebody has eight years of service. At that point the statute requires eight weeks and the contractual term simply does not apply.
So the useful answer is not what the contract says or what the statute says. It is which of them is higher, on this employee, on this date. Fill the contractual figure in and the calculator will tell you when the contract is the one leaving you exposed.
Section 86 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 gives a week’s notice once a month’s service is served, then a week for each complete year, stopping at 12 weeks. Below a month there is no statutory notice at all, which is the opposite of the redundancy position where notice survives after the payment has gone.
The employee’s side is not a mirror image. They owe one week once they qualify and never more than that, however long they stay, unless their contract says otherwise. If they resign in anger and you are not sure it stands, read a resignation in the heat of the moment before you rely on it.
Notice runs from the day after it is given, so a week’s notice handed over on a Monday ends on the Monday following. Whether it is worked, spent on garden leave or paid in lieu does not change the length of it.
Each of these is the statutory minimum the employer must give. Only complete years of service count.
The same bands are set out on gov.uk’s page on notice periods, which also says an employer may give more than the statutory minimum but cannot give less.
They are not the same length. Four weeks is always 28 days, and a calendar month is 28 to 31. The comparison that matters is with the statute: below five complete years of service the statutory minimum is 4 weeks or less, so a contractual month is at least as long and is what you give. From five complete years the statute is 5 weeks or more, which is longer than any month, and the contract stops being the answer. The calculator compares the two by the day each one ends, so it gets the short months right.
On the same date in the following month. Notice runs from the day after it is given, so one month’s notice given on Wednesday 14th October 2026 ends on Saturday 14th November 2026. Four weeks given on the same day would end three days earlier, on Wednesday 11th November.
Where the following month has no such date, the notice ends on the last day of that month, so a month’s notice given on Friday 29th January 2027 ends on Sunday 28th February. That is the general rule for calendar months the House of Lords set in Dodds v Walker, and it applies unless the contract says something different about when notice starts or ends.
Where the contract allows it, you can end the employment straight away and pay for the notice period instead. gov.uk says the payment should cover basic pay for the period plus any contractual extras, such as pension contributions, and that an employer can offer it even where the contract is silent, if the employee agrees. Either way the number of weeks is the one the calculator gives you.
Notice matters for unfair dismissal rights too. If you pay in lieu or give less than the statutory minimum, the statutory notice is still added to the date employment ends when service is counted for the qualifying period, so it can carry somebody past the point where the right begins. Where that date falls on or after 1st January 2027, the point is six months’ service rather than two years. The January 2027 employer checklist covers this and the rest of the change.
Notice tells you when employment ends. It does not tell you whether ending it is fair, and a correctly calculated notice period attached to an unfair dismissal is still an unfair dismissal. Gross misconduct is the obvious exception to the whole thing, since it can justify dismissal without notice at all, and deciding that it applies is exactly the judgement worth being careful about.
See our disclaimer. This is a calculator rather than advice.
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