1 October 2026: why flexible labour is no longer outside the right-to-work perimeter

Until this year, the right-to-work check had a clean boundary: it applied to employees. Workers classified as self-employed, engaged through a platform, or hired as a subcontractor sat largely outside civil penalty liability. Many businesses — food delivery platforms, construction supply chains, courier networks, on-demand care agencies — built parts of their workforce model around that boundary. It no longer exists.

What section 48 actually does

Section 48 of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025 comes into force on 1 October 2026. It extends the illegal working regime beyond traditional employment to cover workers under a "worker's contract" — a category that now captures agency workers, individual subcontractors, gig economy workers, zero-hours workers, and those engaged through online job-matching platforms. Multiple businesses in a supply chain can be held liable for a single illegal worker. The civil penalty regime now follows the work, not the label on the contract.

Why the lead time matters

Auditing every non-employee labour arrangement, updating subcontractor agreements, building right-to-work checks into platform onboarding, and training procurement teams alongside HR is not a task measured in weeks for a business of any real complexity. It is measured in months. The government's own framing is explicit: this is a labour-market measure as much as an immigration one, intended to remove the competitive advantage available to employers who use workforce flexibility as a route around compliance that their competitors already bear the cost of.

This is general awareness content, not legal advice, and does not cover the specific circumstances of any organisation or sector.