From 1 October you have to check your chair renter. Getting it wrong costs £45,000 per person

Right to work checks have always been an employee thing. From 1 October 2026 they are not. If someone rents a chair, covers a Saturday, or takes your colour work as a freelancer, you are the one who has to check they are allowed to work here, and the penalty for getting it wrong starts at £45,000 for each person. The Home Office named beauty salons as a target sector when it announced this. The good news is that the actual task takes about ten minutes per person. The bad news is the bit almost everyone will get wrong, which is thinking the contract saying "self-employed" moves the risk somewhere else.

What changes on 1 October

Section 48 of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025 widens who counts as an employer for right to work purposes. The Home Office Code of practice that puts it into effect is the seventh version of that Code and, in its own words, "will come into force on 1 October 2026". A supporting employer guide carries the same date.

From that day, you have to run a check on three kinds of people you probably do not think of as staff:

• anyone engaged under a worker's contract
• an individual sub-contractor
• anyone engaged through an online matching service, meaning a business that keeps a register of service providers, lets clients enquire through an online service, and charges a fee or commission for the match

The Code is blunt that this is wider than the employment law you may already know: "the definition of worker is broader than the definition in s.230(3)(b) of the Employment Rights Act 1996". So do not reason from whether someone gets holiday pay. That is a different test, in a different statute, for a different purpose.

Who is actually caught in a salon

Start with the definition. A worker's contract is one where an individual undertakes to perform work or services personally for you, and where you are "neither a client nor customer of any profession or business undertaking carried on by the individual".

Read that second half carefully, because it is the whole boundary:

• You contract a stylist to do your clients' hair. Your clients are the customers, not you. You are in scope. Check them.
• You genuinely let a chair to someone with their own clients, their own prices, their own booking. You are closer to a landlord, and the worker's-contract limb may not bite. But the sub-contractor limb might, and the Code says liability "will be considered on a case-by-case basis" including "how the arrangements operate in practice".

That last phrase is the one to sit with. If your contract says independent business but you set the prices, own the diary, take a percentage and tell them when to turn up, the Home Office looks at the practice, not the paperwork.

The honest advice: a check takes about ten minutes and costs nothing. Being wrong about the boundary costs £45,000. Check anyone whose work happens in your salon, and stop trying to win the argument about which limb they fall under.

The sentence that kills the "they are self-employed" defence

If your contracts allow someone to send a substitute, and most freelance and chair-rental agreements do, the Code sets out what you must have in place before the work starts to have any defence at all. One of the requirements is that:

responsibility for such checks "is not delegated to individuals carrying out the work or services, including where the contractual arrangement describes that individual as operating in business on their own account".

So the arrangement almost every salon relies on, where the freelancer is responsible for their own paperwork because they are self-employed, is specifically named and specifically excluded. You cannot hand this obligation to the person you are paying. It is yours.

If your contract lets someone send a cover, read this twice

Where substitution is permitted, the Code requires you to have processes ensuring that a proper check is done on any substitute, that nobody works as a substitute before their right to work is verified, and that you have contractual provisions (suspension or termination, for example) for when you have reasonable cause to believe a substitute is working illegally.

Then there is the part that will surprise people. You must also make sure, for the duration of the engagement, that the person actually doing the work is the person you checked. The Code suggests access passes, facial verification technology, biometric or attendance systems, checks against training records or licences, and re-verification at intervals, and says that where you re-verify at the start of a shift or a new assignment it should be "no less than once in any 24-hour period of activity".

That is a serious operational burden for a four-chair salon, and here is the useful part: it only applies where the contract permits substitution. If you never actually let a stylist send someone else, the substitution clause in your template contract is doing you no favours whatsoever. Taking it out is a fifteen-minute job that removes a whole regime.

The bill if you get this wrong

The Code sets the civil penalty at £45,000 per worker for a first breach, and £60,000 per worker for a repeat breach within three years. The starting point for the calculation is £45,000, not a sliding scale from zero.

Where you are the direct employer, the Code lists what else can follow in serious cases:

• a criminal conviction carrying up to five years in prison and an unlimited fine
• closure of the business and a compliance order from the court
• disqualification as a director
• losing the ability to sponsor migrant workers
• seizure of earnings made as a result of illegal working
• appearing in the published list of non-compliant employers on GOV.UK

And liability does not stop at your own contract. New section 15A extends it beyond the party holding the direct contractual relationship, including up a chain of contracts and to online matching services. If you supply staff to another business, or take them from an agency, the check can land on more than one party.

This is not theoretical. The government's own response to the consultation reports more than 2,400 civil penalties in 2025, with fines exceeding £130 million.

What you do not have to do

Two things worth saying plainly, because the scaremongering will start in September.

The government has said the changes "would not be applied retrospectively". The obligation bites from 1 October, and the detailed worked examples for contract chains, matching services and substitution clauses are due in the supporting guidance dated the same day. If you engage someone new on or after 1 October, check them. For arrangements already running, watch for that guidance rather than guessing.

And you do not need special software. A manual document check or a Home Office online check is enough, done before the work starts and recorded. The compliance basics have not changed. The list of people they apply to has.

Why a buyer will now read your contractor file first

Here is the part that outlasts the deadline.

A salon's freelance roster used to be a tax question in diligence. From October it is an immigration-liability question too, and the two now point the same way. A buyer looking at ten chair renters has to price the chance that one of them was never checked, because the penalty attaches to the business and the transferability of that risk is exactly what diligence is for.

Worse, the consequences are the kind that survive a sale badly. A published non-compliance listing is searchable by your future clients and your future landlord. Director disqualification touches the person, not the company. Neither is something a buyer can price around with a small retention.

So the file matters more than the file used to. A folder with a dated check for every non-employee who has ever worked a shift is now part of what makes the business sellable at a full multiple, in the same unglamorous way that clean books and a lease with time left on it are. It is a cheap asset to build and an expensive one to reconstruct after somebody asks.