The Employment Rights Act 2025 is Coming, is Your Organisation Ready?
- Jun 13
- 6 min read
Written by Jo Ibbott, Executive Menopause Coach
Jo is well-known when it comes to Menopause! She is an Executive Coach specialising in Menopause and Founder of What the Fog? Facebook Community, Foglights Menopause Hub, and developed the Courage Coaching Menopause Advocate Programme for organisations.
I'm going to be honest with you. Most organisations I speak to don’t have this on their radar. They’re thinking April 2027 is still a while away. They've got a policy. Maybe they did a webinar last year. Job done. It's not done. Not even close.
The Employment Rights Act 2025 is now law. From spring 2027, if you employ 250 or more people, a Menopause Action Plan isn't a nice-to-have, it's a legal requirement. The window to get ahead of this, rather than scramble to catch up, is right now.
What the law actually says
The Act received Royal Assent in December 2025 and most organisations have barely clocked it yet. Here's what it means in practice. From April 2026, employers with 250 or more employees are encouraged to voluntarily publish Equality Action Plans alongside their gender pay gap data, including specific, practical steps they're taking to support employees experiencing menopause. From spring 2027, that becomes mandatory. Not guidance. Not best practice. Law.
That's not far away. The difference between organisations that move now and those that don't won't just be compliance. It'll be confidence, because there's a significant gap between producing a document under pressure and genuinely knowing your organisation is doing right by its people.
Why a policy isn't enough
A menopause policy sitting in your HR portal is not a menopause action plan. I say this kindly, but I say it clearly. Government guidance is explicit that action plans must show what you are actively doing, not just what your intentions are. That means how you're assessing the real impact of menopause on your workforce, what practical adjustments you're making, how you're equipping your managers, and what support women can actually access.
The numbers behind this matter. Two thirds of women with menopause symptoms say those symptoms negatively affect their work. One in ten have left employment entirely because support wasn't there. These aren't abstract statistics. They represent real women, real talent, and real experience walking out of your organisation. The majority of organisations have no idea it's happening because no one is joining the dots.
Add into the mix that the legal risk is growing. Menopause is increasingly being raised in employment tribunals under disability discrimination and sex discrimination law. Meaningful, documented action doesn't just do the right thing, it significantly reduces your exposure. A policy tells people you've thought about this. An action plan shows what you've actually done about it.
What a meaningful action plan actually looks like
Government guidance points to five areas. I'd encourage you to think about each one not as a compliance checkbox, but as a genuine question about your culture, because that's what will make the difference between a plan that sits in a folder and one that changes things.
1. Assessment: Do you know how menopause is affecting your people? Most organisations haven't asked. You can't build something meaningful on assumptions.
2. Practical adjustments: Temperature control, uniform flexibility, supportive adjustments during symptomatic periods. Often low cost. Almost always high impact. Deeply appreciated by the women who need them.
3. Manager training: There is much anxiety around having menopause conversations, but this is where the biggest difference is made. A manager who knows how to hold space for a supportive, human conversation without overstepping, making it awkward, or making assumptions is worth more than any policy document. One off e-learning doesn't get you there. Ongoing, practice based training does.
4. Access to support: Making sure women know what's available to them. Occupational health, support via your EAP, mental health resources, menopause coaching, support groups, medical signposting, and ensuring it's genuinely accessible, not just listed somewhere.
5. Cultural normalisation: The hardest to measure and the most important. A workplace where a woman can say, "I'm really struggling with brain fog this week," without fear, without judgment, without feeling like she's flagging herself as a liability, that's built through leadership behaviour over time, not through policy and plans alone.
The opportunity inside the obligation
Compliance is not why I do this work. It's not the best reason for your organisation to act either, though it's a very good prompt. I do this because it makes a real and lasting difference for women and for workplaces of any size.
The organisations I've seen do this best are not the ones who were pushed into it by legislation. They're the ones where a senior leader, sometimes because of their own experience, sometimes because of someone they care about, decided this mattered. That keeping brilliant, experienced, capable women in the workforce and properly supporting them through something that affects roughly half the population for a significant chunk of their working lives was simply the right thing to do.
I spoke recently to a woman with a demanding job, smart, experienced, exactly the kind of person her organisation can't afford to lose. She was struggling with brain fog and severe fatigue. She did the brave thing and went to HR. The response she got? "Are you sure you're still up to the job?"
She hasn't spoken about it since. Instead, she's working harder than ever, terrified she's been flagged, trying to prove she's still capable. Fear is driving her career now. The cruel irony is that the organisation that failed her is about to lose her anyway, just more slowly and at greater cost to her health. This is what the absence of leadership looks like up close.
Legislation gets you to minimum compliance. Leadership gets you somewhere genuinely different. But here's the practical reality too. If you've been trying to make the case for menopause support internally and feeling like you're pushing uphill, the Employment Rights Act 2025 changes that conversation. You now have a legal requirement, a government published framework, and a timeline. Your time is now!
Where to start
If you're reading this and realising your organisation is further behind than you'd like, here's what I'd say. Don't try to do everything at once. The organisations that build real, lasting menopause support start with solid foundations, genuine understanding across all employees and at leadership level, an honest audit of what's already in place, and managers who can have a basic human conversation without panicking, and build from there.
Treat this as a cultural project with a compliance output. The action plan is the documentation. The culture is the point.
Get proper support. The organisations I work with through the Menopause Partner Programme move through this with confidence rather than overwhelm, because there's a clear, structured pathway from where they are now to where they need to be. You don't have to reinvent the wheel or piece this together from Google searches and government PDFs. The expertise exists. Use it.
One question worth sitting with
If a senior leader in your organisation asked you today, "What are we doing about menopause, and is it enough?" could you answer with genuine confidence?
If the honest answer is no, or not yet, or I think we're okay but I'm not totally sure, then this is your moment to change that. Not just because the law is coming, though it is. But because the women in your workforce, experienced, capable, and at the peak of their careers, are more than a compliance issue. They are the backbone of your organisation.
The deadline is coming. The organisations that move now won't just be compliant. They'll be leading.
Read more from Jo Ibbott
Jo Ibbott, Executive Menopause Coach
Jo Ibbott is a leading expert on perimenopause and menopause, particularly its impact on women and the workplace. Experiencing the often-dismissed symptoms of mid-life hormonal shifts firsthand (low mood, anxiety, irritability, loss of confidence, and sleep disturbances), Jo trained as an Executive Menopause Coach. Her mission is to ensure no woman is undermined by menopause. To that end, she equips organisations with understanding and solutions, and has created a range of coaching and educational resources, alongside the What the Fog? Facebook Community, to empower women with knowledge and confidence.
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