Employment Contract

Use our standard template employment contract to put in place a comprehensive and robust contract with your employees.

Our template enables you to put in place a contract of employment with each member of staff. It complies with section 1 of the Employment Rights Act 1996. That Act requires that all employees are given a written statement of the terms and conditions of their employment.

Our template contract contains:

• all of the essential terms you must give to your employees by law,
• plus additional clauses to protect the employer against common issues.

As a standard employment template, this document is suitable for:

• full-time and part-time employees,
• whether you engage them on a fixed-term, permanent or temporary basis.

This template is easy to use and can be customised to individual needs. A sample of the agreement can be viewed by clicking the Preview button above right.

Drafted by David, a solicitor of 30 years, who specialised in Employment and Company law, you can be assured of getting a great document that will protect your position as an employer and meet your company’s legal obligations.

Using our Employment Contract template

Once you have bought it, you will be able to download the document in Word format to your computer. You can then edit it to suit your needs.

As with all of our employee contracts and templates, you get updates to the template free of charge for life. As and when we update the template, you will be notified and the new version will be available for download in your Legalo account that you created when you bought the document.

You will find all the standard clauses that the law in the UK requires for an employment contract. There are also clauses that you can use to customise the template to your specific situation. We have made editing the template easy for you by marking it with square brackets around the relevant parts of the text. What you need to do we have also explained in the guide that comes with the template. If you wish to preview the template, just use the “Preview” feature on the page before you buy anything.

Our detailed guidance notes (free with the Employment Contract template) make adapting the Employment Contract  easy and quick. A summary of the guidance notes are available here: guide to this Employment Contract template.

Understanding Terms of Employment

The Employment Rights Act 1996 requires that a written statement of the employee’s terms of employment is provided to the employee within two months of starting work. When you provide a written statement of terms to the employee, both parties should sign it. It then forms a legally binding contract.

During the 2-month period, you can use our Job Offer Letter if you prefer to set out the core terms of employment and then put in place a full contract before the two-month period ends.

Many companies use this two-month period as a probationary period. However, you can extend a probationary period for up to six months.

We have designed this draft for use by you with all your junior staff. For directors, managers, sales staff and other key or senior employees, please use our Director’s Service Agreement template. Among other matters, that document includes additional clauses that give the company more protection against an employee’s leaving to work for a competitor and pinching customers, ideas or intellectual property rights from your business, and thus causing potentially serious difficulties for your business.

Since a UK lawyer who is familiar with employment law has written our Employment Contract template, you can buy with confidence.

Other Employment Contract Templates that we offer

Have a look at our other employment contract documents, if you need something more specialised:

• Director’s service agreement
• Fixed-term employment contract
• Zero hours employment contract