Employment tribunal time limits for gig workers

What it is

Employment tribunal time limits are the strict deadlines within which you must bring a claim. For most worker claims, including unlawful deduction of wages, holiday pay, detriment, whistleblowing, discrimination and breach of the right to be accompanied, the limit is three months minus one day from the act complained of. ACAS Early Conciliation is mandatory first and pauses the clock for the conciliation period, but the underlying deadline is not extended by much. Miss the deadline and the tribunal almost always refuses to hear the claim, regardless of how strong it is on the facts.

How it applies to gig workers

For an Uber driver working under Aslam, the deadline starts on the date of the act. If Uber deactivates you on 10 December 2025, you have until 9 March 2026 to notify ACAS. If Uber underpays holiday pay on a weekly statement dated 15 January 2026, the clock for that specific underpayment runs until 14 April 2026. Where there is a series of linked deductions (for example, an ongoing NMW shortfall across many weeks), the law allows you to treat the last deduction in a series as the trigger, but only if the gap between deductions is not more than three months and the chain is unbroken. The July 2025 Addison Lee tribunal decision knocked out the old two-year backstop on unlawful deductions claims as unlawful, which is why the March 2026 compensation ruling could reach back further than Addison Lee wanted.

Take a 22 year old Uber driver in Leeds who notices in February 2026 that Uber has been underpaying holiday pay since June 2024. Week by week, each underpayment has its own three-months-minus-one-day clock. By February 2026, the underpayments from June 2024 to October 2025 look out of time at first glance. But if the underpayments are a linked series with no gap over three months, the whole series may be pulled in under the last-deduction rule, and the post-July 2025 removal of the two-year backstop means the claim can reach back through the series. This is where specialist legal advice from Leigh Day, Bates Wells or Farore Law matters more than internet forums.

Discrimination claims under the Equality Act 2010 use the same three-months-minus-one-day rule but have a more generous "just and equitable" extension power for tribunals. NMW claims can alternatively go to HMRC, which can reach back up to six years and fine the employer, but you usually cannot pursue the same underpayment through both routes. For pension auto-enrolment failures, the Pensions Regulator has separate enforcement powers, not a tribunal time limit, but if the same facts also give rise to a detriment claim the three-months-minus-one-day rule applies to that claim.

What you should do about it

• Write the exact date of the act on every file you open — deactivation date, last deduction date, detriment date.
• Count back to the last safe ACAS notification date and put two calendar reminders: one at 10 weeks, one at 12 weeks.
• If there is a series of deductions, keep every pay statement so a lawyer can check whether the series pulls older weeks in.
• If you think you have a discrimination claim, ask specifically about the "just and equitable" extension if you are close to or past the limit.
• Never rely on internal platform appeal timers to pause your ACAS clock; they do not.

Last reviewed

19 April 2026

Internal links this page emits:

• ACAS Early Conciliation
• worker status explained
• Addison Lee 2025-26 rulings
• calculate your ACAS deadline
• just deactivated — what now

Primary source used:

• C:\Users\thest\Documents\GigKiln\Research\S3-rights\3.4-worker-rights.md