Guernsey Employment Law: Pay, Leave, and Dismissal

Guernsey employment law is a distinct island framework, separate from the United Kingdom, built mainly on the Employment Protection (Guernsey) Law, 1998, the Conditions of Employment (Guernsey) Law, 1985, and the Prevention of Discrimination (Guernsey) Ordinance, 2022.¹ It gives you a minimum wage, notice periods, protection from unfair dismissal after one year, discrimination protections on five grounds, and an auto-enrolled pension. What it does not give you is a statutory right to paid annual leave, paid public holidays, or minimum rest breaks. Those things depend on your contract, which is why the written statement of terms your employer is required to hand you matters so much here.

Your Written Statement of Terms

Every new employee must receive a written statement of employment terms within four weeks of starting work. It is not technically the contract itself, but it is the document a tribunal will look at first if there is ever a dispute about what was agreed.

It has to record the names of both parties and the date continuous employment began, the rate of pay and pay frequency, hours of work, the job title or a brief description of duties, any agreed holiday entitlement, and, if the role is fixed-term, the expected end date. Notice periods, sick pay, and pension arrangements should also be spelled out.

Because Guernsey law is silent on several entitlements the UK guarantees, whatever your written statement says on leave, breaks, and holidays effectively becomes your floor. If it is not in writing, you are relying on verbal promises.

Minimum Wage and Payslips

The Minimum Wage (Guernsey) Law, 2009, sets mandatory hourly floors by age. As of October 2025, the adult rate for anyone 18 or over, including apprentices, is £12.60 per hour. The young person’s rate for 16- and 17-year-olds who are not apprentices is £11.35 per hour.² Rates are reviewed annually, with any change usually taking effect each October. Employers who underpay face enforcement orders and financial penalties.

You must also receive a written pay statement on or before each payday, showing gross pay, each deduction and the reason for it, net pay, and the payment date.³ No payslip at all is itself a breach worth raising.

Annual Leave, Rest Breaks, and Public Holidays

This is where Guernsey differs sharply from the UK, and it catches people off guard. There is no statutory entitlement to paid annual leave, and no statutory entitlement to paid or unpaid time off for public holidays.³ Your holiday allowance, holiday pay, and any enhanced rate for working a bank holiday come entirely from your contract.

Guernsey also has no law setting a maximum working week or requiring minimum rest breaks during a shift.⁴ Many employers voluntarily offer terms comparable to UK standards, but “voluntary” and “required” are different things when a dispute arises.

Two contract details to check. If your contract mentions an entitlement to bank holidays without naming a fixed number of days, that language is generally read to cover all bank and public holidays. If instead it says public holidays are included within your overall annual leave allowance, your employer is not required to add extra days when an ad-hoc holiday is declared.

Maternity, Adoption, and Partner Leave

The Maternity Leave and Adoption Leave (Guernsey) Ordinance, 2016, provides a basic period of 12 weeks. Dismissing an employee because of pregnancy, childbirth, or for taking maternity or adoption leave is automatically unfair regardless of length of service.⁵

The leave itself is unpaid as a matter of employment law, but eligible parents can claim social security. Maternal Health Allowance, Newborn Care Allowance, and Parental Allowance together run for up to 26 weeks, at a full weekly rate of £292.67 from January 2026, with reduced rates depending on your contribution record.⁶ You need at least 26 reckonable contributions to qualify for any benefit.

Partners taking maternity support leave are entitled to two weeks, unpaid unless the employer chooses otherwise. Guernsey does not currently have a shared parental leave scheme comparable to the UK’s.

The Secondary Pension

Since the phased rollout completed in October 2025, all Guernsey employers must auto-enrol eligible employees into a secondary pension scheme, commonly Your Island Pension. For 2026, the minimum combined contribution is 2.5% of gross earnings: 1% from the employer and 1.5% from the employee.⁷ If an employer voluntarily pays more than 1%, the employee’s share falls by the same amount.

The rates are scheduled to rise in stages, reaching a combined 10% by 2032 (3.5% employer, 6.5% employee).⁸ Expect deductions to grow each year rather than stay flat.

Notice Periods and Dismissal

The Employment Protection (Guernsey) Law, 1998, sets statutory minimum notice by length of continuous service, and these apply both ways:

These are floors. A longer contractual notice period wins. Short-term contracts of three months or less, and engagements for a specific task not expected to exceed three months, are exempt.

An employer can dismiss immediately for gross misconduct without notice, meaning conduct serious enough that the employment relationship is fundamentally broken, such as theft, violence, or fraud. Even then, following a fair disciplinary process matters. Skipping it is one of the fastest ways to turn a legitimate dismissal into a successful unfair dismissal claim.

Written Reasons for Dismissal

Any employee with at least one year of continuous service can request a written statement of the reasons for dismissal, and the employer must provide it within seven days. Refusing, or giving an untrue or inadequate reason, can result in the Tribunal ordering payment of roughly two weeks’ pay as a penalty. A pregnant employee who is dismissed is entitled to written reasons automatically, without asking, regardless of length of service.⁵

Unfair Dismissal

To bring an unfair dismissal claim you generally need at least one year of continuous service with the same employer. The employer must show the dismissal was for a fair reason and that they acted reasonably. Fair reasons include capability or qualifications, conduct, redundancy, a legal restriction preventing continued employment, or some other substantial reason.

Process matters as much as reason. Redundancy requires a genuine reduction in staffing needs and a fair selection method. Conduct dismissals require investigation and a chance for the employee to respond. Most successful claims turn on shortcuts in the process rather than the underlying facts.

Dismissals That Are Automatically Unfair

Certain dismissals are automatically unfair no matter how long you have worked there, so the one-year qualifying period does not apply. These include dismissals connected to pregnancy or childbirth, taking or requesting maternity, adoption, or support leave, redundancy during maternity leave where a suitable alternative role existed but was not offered, trade union membership or activities, health and safety concerns such as refusing an unsafe task, refusal of Sunday shop work by a protected shop worker, discrimination on a protected ground, and asserting a statutory right.⁵

Compensation

If the Tribunal finds a dismissal was unfair, the maximum compensation is six months’ pay, or for weekly-paid employees, one week’s pay multiplied by 26. That cap makes Guernsey awards considerably lower than UK equivalents. Guernsey also has no statutory redundancy pay scheme. Whether you get a redundancy payment depends entirely on your contract or company policy.

Discrimination Protections

The Prevention of Discrimination (Guernsey) Ordinance, 2022, makes it unlawful to discriminate in employment on five protected grounds: disability, race, carer status, sexual orientation, and religion or belief.⁹ Age is expected to be added once drafting is complete, though no implementation date has been confirmed. The protections cover the full employment cycle, from recruitment through promotion, working conditions, and dismissal.

Direct discrimination is treating someone less favourably because of a protected ground. Indirect discrimination is applying a rule or policy that looks neutral but puts people sharing a protected ground at a disadvantage, unless the employer can objectively justify it. Employers must also make reasonable adjustments for disabled employees, and provide auxiliary aids where needed. The duty to adjust physical features of premises, however, does not come into force until October 2028 at the earliest.¹⁰

How to Bring a Complaint

The order of steps matters, and getting it wrong can cost you the claim.

First, before you can lodge anything at the Employment and Discrimination Tribunal, you must notify the Employment and Equal Opportunities Service (EEOS) by submitting an ITC1 form. This triggers pre-complaint conciliation, and importantly the three-month time limit for bringing a claim stops running while conciliation is under way.¹¹

A conciliation officer then works with both sides to try to reach a voluntary settlement. The process is confidential and usually happens by phone or in separate meetings rather than joint sessions.¹² A settlement reached this way is legally binding. If conciliation fails or either side declines, EEOS issues an ITC3 certificate that lets you proceed.

With the ITC3, you submit an ET1 form to the Tribunal. The overall time limit is three months from the effective date of termination, or from the date of the last act of discrimination. The conciliation period is excluded from that calculation, but time before and after conciliation counts. File late and the Tribunal will ask you to explain why, and it decides whether to accept the filing.¹³ After filing, the matter may be referred back to EEOS for a further conciliation window of around six weeks before the Tribunal takes it forward to a hearing. Most cases that settle do so before a full hearing.

1
States of Guernsey. Employment & Social Security
2
States of Guernsey. Minimum Wage
3
EEOS. Contracts of Employment – Written Statements and Payslips
4
States of Guernsey. Working Hours & Rest Breaks
5
EEOS. The Requirements of the Employment Protection (Guernsey) Law
6
States of Guernsey. Benefit Payment & Contribution Rates for 2026
7
States of Guernsey. Employer Quick Start Guide
8
Your Island Pension. Contributions
9
EEOS. Chapter 2: Protected Grounds
10
EEOS. Employment Guidance – Complete Guide
11
EEOS. Making an Employment Complaint
12
States of Guernsey. Conciliation for Individuals
13
EEOS. Chapter 10: Complaints