What is changing: 2025 to 2028

Already in force

This field has moved more in the last two years than in the decade before it. Everything in this table is law today, with the instrument that made it so.

Figures last reviewed 9 September 2026.

The 2025 Dismissal Code

On 4 September 2025 a single new Code replaced both Schedule 8 to the Labour Relations Act and the separate 1999 code on dismissals for operational requirements. Any disciplinary policy, probation clause or retrenchment procedure that cites “Schedule 8” is now citing a repealed instrument.

Two changes matter most to small and medium employers. The first is an express acknowledgement of proportionality:

The second is probation. The Code restates its purpose — evaluating performance and suitability — and then relaxes the standard for a dismissal during or at the end of it, while keeping a process requirement in place:

“Less compelling” is not “none”. The employer may still only dismiss or extend probation after giving the employee an opportunity to make representations and considering them. See the permanent employment contract for how to draft probation to match.

Parental leave

In October 2025 the Constitutional Court declared the maternity and parental leave provisions of the Basic Conditions of Employment Act and parts of the Unemployment Insurance Act invalid for discriminating between classes of parents. The declaration is suspended to give Parliament time to legislate, but the Court read in an interim regime that applies now.

A single parent, or the only employed parent in a relationship, is entitled to at least four consecutive months. Where both parents work, the couple share four months and ten days between them and decide how to divide it. The practical consequences for an employer are a leave policy rewrite, a payroll configuration change, and a conversation with staff about how the sharing election is recorded.

The Unemployment Insurance Fund side is less settled: the Court did not read wording into that Act, so how the Fund pays a father taking shared leave is being worked out administratively. Frame any policy carefully on that point and expect the remedial Bill in due course.

Published, but not law

In February 2026 the Department published two bills for public comment: the Labour Relations Amendment Bill, 2025 and the Labour Law Amendment Bill, 2025, which between them would touch the Labour Relations Act, the Basic Conditions of Employment Act, the Employment Equity Act and the National Minimum Wage Act. Comment closed at the end of March 2026. Neither had been introduced in Parliament by September 2026, and the Department has said the amendments can be expected to be promulgated in 2028.

Four proposals are worth planning around, precisely because they are directional rather than imminent.

• Dependent contractors. A new Schedule 11 to the Labour Relations Act would extend organisational and collective-bargaining rights to people who fall outside the section 213 definition of employee but who are not genuinely carrying on their own business — with a presumption the employer could rebut only by showing no control, no integration and no work done for its customers on its terms. It would not give them unfair-dismissal rights.
• On-call and zero-hours work. A proposed new section in the Basic Conditions of Employment Act would require guaranteed hours, availability periods and notice periods for calling or cancelling a shift to be recorded in writing, with pay where a shift is cancelled late.
• Severance at two weeks. The statutory minimum would rise from one week’s remuneration per completed year to two.
• Parental leave. The remedial legislation the Constitutional Court called for, replacing the read-in regime.

Separately, the Employment Services Amendment Bill was introduced in the National Assembly in mid-2026 and would empower the Minister to set sector quotas for the employment of foreign nationals, with small employers excluded. Its progress is worth watching if you rely on foreign skills — see employing foreign nationals. The Tobacco Products and Electronic Delivery Systems Control Bill was still in committee in August 2026.

The two bills were published together in General Notice 3801 in Government Gazette 54220 of 26 February 2026, with the Memorandum of Objects, for public comment. Both are on the sources page if you want to read them in full.

Treat all of this as a planning horizon, not a compliance deadline. Nothing above changes an obligation today.

The annual watch list

Four dates recur, and a business with staff near any threshold should hold them in a calendar rather than rediscover them.

Two pieces of litigation are also live. The sectoral numerical targets survived an interim challenge in the High Court in August 2025, the Supreme Court of Appeal in March 2026 and the Constitutional Court in May 2026, but the substantive challenge has not been decided — the framework remains in effect until a court orders otherwise. And the Department’s consultation on the 2027 minimum wage closed in early September 2026, so the next rate is pending.

The simplest defence against all of this is to stop hard-coding figures. Refer to “the earnings threshold determined by the Minister under section 6(3) of the Basic Conditions of Employment Act” and “the national minimum wage” in contracts and policies, and let the notices do the work. See the earnings threshold.

Common questions