UK Illegal Working Law Expansion Starts 1 October 2026

According to legislation.gov.uk, the Government has set 1 October 2026 as the date when section 48 of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025 will begin to apply. The change was made through the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025 (Commencement No. 4) Regulations 2026, signed on 24 June 2026 by Home Office minister Alex Norris. That may sound technical, but the date matters. This is the point when one part of the 2025 Act stops being a plan on paper and becomes live law.

If you are new to this kind of legal wording, a commencement regulation is basically a switch-on order. Parliament can pass an Act first, then ministers choose the day when different sections actually start. In this case, the regulations do not create a brand-new policy. They bring an existing part of the 2025 Act into force. The explanatory note on legislation.gov.uk also says these are the fourth commencement regulations made under the Act. That tells us the wider law has been starting in stages, not all at once.

The provision being switched on here is section 48. Its title refers to extending the prohibition on employment to other working arrangements, and that is the key point to hold on to. The law is no longer being framed only around a straightforward contract of employment. Section 48 amends the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006, especially the illegal working provisions in sections 15 to 24. In simple terms, the legal reach is being widened so that it can cover arrangements beyond a standard employment contract.

**What this means:** from 1 October 2026, the rules around illegal working are set to apply more broadly. The explanatory note says liability for civil penalties under section 15 of the 2006 Act is being expanded as well. So this is not only about who counts as an employee in the narrowest sense. It is also about who may be held responsible when the rules are broken. For employers, that matters because many workplaces do not run on one simple model. People can be engaged through a range of working arrangements, and the direction of this law is clear: the Home Office wants the rules to reach further than the classic employer-employee setup.

It is also worth noticing what this instrument does not include. The note says no full impact assessment has been produced for these regulations on their own. Instead, readers are pointed to the wider impact assessment published for the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025. That does not make this measure minor. It tells us the Government sees this instrument mainly as a start-date regulation for a policy that Parliament has already approved, rather than as a separate reform with its own full economic document attached.

For readers trying to make sense of public policy, this is a good example of how legal change often happens quietly. A short statutory instrument can still bring real consequences. Here, the practical result is that from 1 October 2026, UK illegal working law will apply across a wider set of working arrangements, with broader civil penalty exposure for those caught by the rules. So the date to remember is 1 October 2026, and the legal move to remember is section 48 coming into force. If you hear more discussion about right-to-work checks, employer responsibility or non-standard working arrangements this autumn, this regulation is part of the reason why.