Notice period calculator

The two sides owe wildly different amounts

Most people assume notice is mutual. It is not, and the gap gets bigger the longer you stay.

• Your employer owes you one week from a month's service, then one week for every complete year from two years, up to a maximum of 12 weeks.
• You owe your employer one week from a month's service. That is it. It never grows.

Under a month's service, neither side owes any statutory notice at all.

Your contract usually beats the statutory minimum

These figures are a legal floor, not the normal answer. Most contracts ask for more, especially going up the seniority ladder: one month or three months' notice from the employee is common, and entirely lawful.

A contract can always give more notice than the statutory minimum, on either side. It can never give less. If your contract says one month and the statutory minimum works out at six weeks, you get six weeks.

So the honest order is: check your contract first, then use this as the floor it cannot go below.

The 12-week ceiling

An employer's statutory notice stops growing after 12 years. At 12 years you are owed 12 weeks, and at 30 years you are still owed 12 weeks.

Long-serving staff usually have contractual notice well above the statutory floor, which is where the extra protection actually comes from.

Pay in lieu, and gardening leave

Your employer can pay you instead of working the notice, if your contract allows it. That is PILON, and it is taxable in the normal way.

That last part matters if you are being made redundant, because the two payments are treated completely differently. PILON is earnings and is taxed from the first pound. Genuine statutory redundancy pay is not, and the first £30,000 of it is tax free. A settlement that bundles them together can look far better than it is. Wagepage's redundancy pay calculator separates the two and shows the tax on each.

Gardening leave is different: you stay employed, still paid, still bound by your contract, but told not to come in. It keeps you out of a competitor's office while your knowledge goes stale.

What you get paid during notice

If you work your notice normally, you are paid normally. Where it gets murky is when you do not work it.

gov.uk is direct about this: you may not get your normal pay rate if you are not working during notice because you are off sick, on holiday, or on maternity, paternity, adoption or shared parental leave. What you actually receive then depends on your contract and on whether you resigned, were dismissed, or were made redundant.

So the contract matters twice over. It sets how much notice is owed, and it sets what that notice is worth if you spend it at home.

Holiday during your notice

You keep building up annual leave for the whole notice period, because you are still employed until the last day.

Two things follow. Any leave you have accrued and not taken by your final day has to be paid off, which turns up as a lump on the last payslip. And your employer can generally require you to take leave during notice rather than pay it out, provided they give you notice of it that is at least twice the length of the leave itself.

When no notice is owed at all

Gross misconduct allows summary dismissal, which means dismissal without notice or pay in lieu. That is the exception rather than an alternative route, and it needs the conduct to be serious enough to destroy the employment relationship: theft, violence, gross negligence.

An employer who skips notice for ordinary poor performance, or for something they have simply grown tired of, is in breach of contract and that is a wrongful dismissal claim rather than an unfair dismissal one.

The reverse applies too. Walk out without giving your notice and you are technically in breach, though in practice employers rarely pursue it unless your leaving costs them something they can put a number on.