Trial shifts: when a UK kitchen has to pay, and what it costs if you don't

The government has already written the chef example for you

The Department for Business and Trade’s minimum wage guidance contains worked scenarios, two of them set in kitchens. Almost nobody writing about trial shifts quotes them, which is odd, because they answer the question operators are actually asking.

The first is a trainee chef asked to do a Saturday trial from noon until midnight. He preps vegetables that later go into soup and loads dishwashers, with little supervision. DBT’s view: he is likely to be entitled to the minimum wage. Twelve hours, the busiest day of the week, tasks that do not closely match the advertised job.

The second is Mary, applying for a head chef job, who attends an assessment day with four other applicants and cooks a range of dishes for the interviewing panel. DBT’s view: entitlement is unlikely.

Now the one that catches people out. A third example in the same guidance has Aaliyah doing a two-hour Saturday trial in a café, serving real customers and working alongside the team. The café gets genuine value from those two hours. DBT still treats her as unlikely to be entitled, because two hours is proportionate to what the role needs testing and she is observed throughout.

So the dividing line is not simply whether you got something out of it. Real customer-facing work in a short, properly observed trial can still sit outside the minimum wage. What moves a trial across the line is length that goes beyond what the job needs testing, thin supervision, and tasks that stop resembling an assessment and start resembling a shift.

The law does not mention trial shifts at all

There is no section of any UK statute that defines a trial work period, and none that says how many unpaid hours you are allowed.

What exists is the definition of a worker in section 54(3) of the National Minimum Wage Act 1998: someone working under a contract of employment, or under any other contract where they personally do work or services for another party who is not their client or customer. Note the word contract. Worker status is not automatic the moment somebody picks up a knife; the question is whether the arrangement became a contract for personal work. What the section does not contain is any carve-out that makes a trial unpaid by virtue of being called a trial. And once a contract is there, neither side can agree to waive the minimum wage.

The government’s response to its own call for evidence, published on 27 February 2026, puts it plainly: current legislation does not define a trial work period or state precisely when at least the minimum wage must be paid, but where an employer asks someone to carry out a trial, test or recruitment exercise, that person may nevertheless be a worker and entitled to the minimum wage.

The trap is that a contract does not need paperwork. HMRC’s own manual confirms a contract can be oral, written, or implied from conduct. A candidate who walks in, is handed a board and a knife, and starts working has arguably accepted an offer. Nobody signed anything and it may already be too late.

The six things that decide it

DBT guidance says HMRC, courts and tribunals are likely to look at six factors. Whether there is a genuine recruitment purpose behind the trial. Whether its length goes beyond what the advertised role reasonably needs testing for. How closely the candidate is observed. Whether the tasks actually test the job on offer. Whether the work gives you value beyond assessment. And whether trials have quietly become part of how you staff the kitchen.

That last one is the one that catches restaurants. Running one trialist for a head chef vacancy reads as recruitment. Running four every Saturday, with no decision about how many you will hire, reads as a rota.

No single factor decides it, but the worked examples show which ones carry the most weight. Every scenario the guidance treats as unlikely to attract the minimum wage is short and closely observed. Every scenario it treats as likely is long, thinly supervised, or asks the candidate to do things the advertised job does not really require. A real vacancy, written assessment criteria and a named observer all help. They will not rescue a twelve-hour Saturday.

The practical read for a kitchen: if the trialist ends up covering a station, filling a gap on the rota, or working stretches with nobody assessing them, you have drifted out of assessment and into labour. Pay for it.

Where the line sits on length

The government’s position is that a trial lasting more than one day is likely to attract the minimum wage in all but exceptional cases. Below that, a few hours can remain an unpaid assessment, but nothing guarantees it.

You will see “two shifts” quoted online. That comes from a 2022 employment tribunal, Karimi v Fadi Ltd, where Employment Judge Wright said a trial period “should be a brief time for one or possibly two shifts at most” while ruling that a two-week unpaid trial period was excessively long. It is a first-instance, fact-specific observation in a case about a tailoring shop, not a binding rule and not a safe harbour. Treat the DBT line as the working rule and the tribunal remark as a warning about how a judge is likely to react.

Jobcentre Plus Work Trials are a separate scheme with their own rules, agreed with Jobcentre Plus before the job is offered. You cannot borrow their framework to run your own unpaid trial.

What it costs when it goes wrong

Since 7 April 2026, minimum wage enforcement sits with the Fair Work Agency, with HMRC officers acting as its enforcement officers. This is new, and it is the part most articles on this subject have not caught up with.

A Notice of Underpayment can require you to repay every affected worker, uprated to current rates where those are higher than the historical ones, plus a penalty of 200% of the arrears. The minimum penalty is £100 and the maximum is £20,000 per worker. Pay the sums due and at least half the penalty within 14 days of the notice and the penalty is halved (Employment Rights Act 2025, s.108(4)); otherwise arrears are due within 28 days.

Two real cases show what this looks like in practice.

In Hudson v Bantu Enterprises Ltd (1309244/2020), a Birmingham restaurant described a head chef arrangement as a trial and as self-employment. He worked from 3 July to 4 August 2020 on a rota, doing the advertised job. The tribunal found worker status and awarded £2,750.03 gross for unpaid salary and holiday pay.

Karimi v Fadi Ltd (2301717/2020) shows how far that can run. The employer said it was a two-week unpaid trial. The tribunal found the claimant had been a worker across the whole period she attended, 24 January to 7 March 2020, and that she was owed the minimum wage for every hour worked. It counted 18 working days and 137 hours, which at the then rate of £7.70 came to £1,054.90 owed. She had been paid £223.15, so the balance ordered was £831.75 gross.

That is the number worth sitting with. Calling something a two-week trial did not make it two weeks, and it did not make it unpaid. The employer ended up owing for six weeks of work.

You also need to be able to prove what happened. Minimum wage records created from 1 April 2021 must generally be kept for six years, and you must be able to show actual hours worked, not just what the rota said.

What it costs when you do it properly

Here is the arithmetic, using the rates in force from 1 April 2026, a 12.07% holiday allowance and 2026/27 employer National Insurance thresholds.

Employer National Insurance is 15% above a £96 weekly secondary threshold in 2026/27, and there is no employer NIC for under-21s earning below £967 a week, which is why most of these come out at zero. Only the 21+ eight-hour case crosses the threshold, adding £2.69. For a one-off engagement with no regular pay interval HMRC generally uses the employment period or one week, whichever is longer, so the weekly threshold is the one that applies here rather than the monthly one.

One thing to watch: pension auto-enrolment is assessed in every pay reference period, not once a year. The 2026/27 trigger is £10,000 a year, which is £833 a month or £192 a week. A trialist paid more than £192 in a weekly pay period is an eligible jobholder and must be enrolled. There is no single-shift exception. What there is, is postponement: you can defer assessment by up to three months, but only if you issue the required notice within six weeks. If you run paid trials at all regularly, set the postponement notice up once rather than discovering it afterwards.

So the decision is £56.98 against a penalty running to £20,000 per worker. CIPD’s 2024 survey put the median private-sector recruitment cost for a non-senior hire at £1,750, which makes a paid four-hour trial about 3% of it. It is the cheapest line in the hiring process, and it is the one operators try to save on.

A kitchen trial triggers more than pay

General employment-law pages skip this half, because they are not thinking about a commercial kitchen.

Right to work. Today the statutory duty bites on employment under a contract of employment, apprenticeship or service, and the Home Office guidance draws a line between that and people who are not direct employees. It says nothing specific about trials. So a genuinely short observed assessment is not clearly caught, while a hands-on productive trial may well be, because an implied contract of service can arise from conduct. From 1 October 2026 the duty extends to individuals on worker’s contracts and to labour supplied through chains, which pulls most paid trials squarely into scope. Given the civil penalty starts at £45,000 per illegal worker, checking everyone who sets foot in the kitchen is the cheap policy even where the duty is arguable. The three valid routes and the expired-BRP trap are in the right to work checks guide.

Health and safety. Section 3 of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 requires you to run the business so that people who are not your employees are not exposed to risk, so far as is reasonably practicable. A candidate does not lose that protection because you have decided there is no contract. The Act does not itself list what to do; what it means in practice comes out of your risk assessment, and for a kitchen that normally lands on induction, emergency arrangements, knife and machinery safety, and keeping an unfamiliar person off equipment they have not been trained on. In Northern Ireland the equivalent duties sit under the Health and Safety at Work (Northern Ireland) Order 1978.

Food hygiene and allergens. Food handlers must be supervised and instructed or trained to a level appropriate to what they are doing, under Regulation (EC) 852/2004. FSA guidance requires accurate allergen information and control of cross-contact for the 14 regulated allergens, and says staff should be trained. A generic certificate is not knowledge of your recipes. If a trialist is plating and someone asks what is in the sauce, that is your problem, not theirs.

Under-18s. Above school-leaving age and under 18, the limits are eight hours a day and 40 a week, a 30-minute break when working over four and a half hours, and 12 consecutive hours of daily rest. They must not work between midnight and 4am, though catering has a narrow exception allowing work until midnight or from 4am under conditions.

Insurance. Most employers must hold at least £5 million of employers’ liability cover. Whether a trialist falls inside it depends on the real relationship, not the label. Ask your insurer in writing whether recruitment assessments are covered, before you need the answer.

For care homes, schools and nurseries there is a further layer, because the DBS position on kitchen staff does not pause for a trial. If the setting requires a check, it requires it before the person is unsupervised around residents or children, and the same applies across our education sector work.

How to run one that stands up

Confirm there is a real vacancy and write down what you are assessing. Use the shortest period that genuinely tests it. Prefer a simulated exercise, a knife skills test or a tasting, where the output is not sold. If the candidate contributes to service, production, cleaning or cover at any point, pay for the whole period rather than trying to split the shift.

Put it in writing before they arrive: who the employer is, the vacancy, the date and times, breaks, the tasks and who is observing, whether any output will be served, the hourly rate and the pay date, and that this is a fixed engagement with no promise of ongoing work. Workers are entitled to a written statement of particulars from day one, and a payslip on or before payday.

Then keep the advert, the invitation, the actual start and finish times, what they did, what happened to any food they made, the assessment decision, the payroll record and the right to work evidence.

If you are hiring at volume across London kitchens or anywhere else, the honest answer is that trials scale badly. Assessing ten chefs properly costs more in supervisor time than the wages do. That is usually the point at which operators stop trialling and start booking staff whose work is already known, which is most of what we do on hire staff.

If you are the chef and you were not paid

Ask before you go, in writing. Confirm the start and finish time, the tasks, the hourly rate, the pay date, and whether you will be paid regardless of whether you get the job. Keep the messages.

If you worked and were not paid, Acas says to raise it with the employer informally first, then through a formal grievance. You can also ask in writing for your minimum wage records; the employer normally has 14 days to produce them, and a tribunal can award 80 times the hourly minimum wage rate if they fail.

After that there are two routes and you must pick one, because Acas is explicit that you cannot take the same issue through two legal processes. Either complain to HMRC through the Pay and Work Rights complaint form, which you can use after leaving and which lets you ask that your identity is not disclosed, or bring an employment tribunal claim.

Watch the clock. In Great Britain the current limit is three months minus one day from the date payment was due. Notifying Acas for early conciliation in time pauses it; raising an internal grievance does not. Acas is on 0300 123 1100, Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm.

In Northern Ireland the route is different. Early conciliation goes through the Labour Relations Agency rather than Acas, and the claim goes to an Industrial Tribunal. The October 2026 extension covers specified Northern Ireland claims including those under the National Minimum Wage Act, but do not assume any other Great Britain deadline or procedure transfers.

What is law, and what people think is law

Plenty of operators believe unpaid trial shifts were banned. They were not.

The Unpaid Trial Work Periods (Prohibition) Bill, sponsored by Stewart McDonald MP, was introduced on 19 July 2017 and had its second reading on 16 March 2018. It failed. It was reintroduced on 11 March 2024 and died when Parliament was dissolved on 30 May 2024. None of it became law.

The Employment Rights Act 2025 received Royal Assent on 18 December 2025 and contains no trial shift prohibition either. A Lords amendment that would have required the minimum wage for work done with a view to a position was withdrawn. When the government published its call-for-evidence response on 27 February 2026, it accepted that some businesses misuse trials but chose to keep legitimate recruitment assessments, backed by guidance and enforcement rather than a ban.

Two dates worth putting in the diary, both Great Britain unless stated. For workplace problems occurring on or after 1 October 2026, most tribunal time limits rise from three months to six, which doubles the window in which an unpaid trialist can come back at you; that extension reaches specified Northern Ireland claims too. And from 1 January 2027 the unfair dismissal qualifying period drops from two years to six months. It is not becoming a day-one right, whatever you have read.

Frequently asked questions

Are unpaid trial shifts legal in the UK?

There is no outright ban and no general exemption. It turns on whether a contract arose that makes the candidate a worker under the National Minimum Wage Act 1998, assessed case by case. A short, closely observed assessment can lawfully be unpaid, and the government’s own examples include a two-hour cafe trial serving real customers that it treats as unlikely to qualify. A long or thinly supervised shift is a different matter.

How many hours can a trial shift be without pay?

There is no permitted number. Government guidance says a trial longer than one day is likely to attract the minimum wage in all but very exceptional circumstances, and shorter trials are judged on the six factors rather than the clock. Anyone quoting a safe two-hour or four-hour figure is inventing it.

What is the penalty for not paying a trial shift?

Arrears to every affected worker, uprated to current rates where those are higher, plus a penalty of 200% of the arrears with a minimum of £100 and a maximum of £20,000 per worker. Paying the arrears and half the penalty within 14 days halves the penalty. Since 7 April 2026 this is enforced by the Fair Work Agency.

Does a trial shift need a right to work check?

Home Office guidance has no trial-specific rule. The duty currently attaches to employment under a contract of employment, apprenticeship or service, which a hands-on productive trial may create through conduct even without paperwork. From 1 October 2026 it also covers workers on worker’s contracts, which catches most paid trials. Since the civil penalty starts at £45,000 per illegal worker, check first.

Do I have to pay a chef who fails the trial?

Yes, if they were a worker during it. Entitlement to the minimum wage does not depend on whether you offer them the job, and it is not conditional on how well they cooked. That was the position in Karimi: the employer owed for every hour worked regardless of what it had called the arrangement.

How much does a compliant paid trial actually cost?

Using April 2026 rates plus a holiday allowance and employer National Insurance, about £57 for four hours with a chef aged 21 or over, £48.64 for an 18 to 20 year old, and £35.86 for an under-18 or qualifying apprentice.

Most operators run trials because they have been let down before and want to see someone work before committing. That is a fair instinct and an expensive way to solve the problem. If you would rather skip the assessment entirely, send us one tough weekend and judge us on the fulfilment rate instead. Get Staff Now.