Seasonal and Casual Staff: Contracts That Protect Your Hotel Through Peak and Quiet Periods

You have taken on nine extra people for the summer. Two in housekeeping, three in the restaurant, a couple behind the bar, and a pair of kitchen porters who may or may not still be with you by August. The rota is covered, the season is booked out, and everyone is getting paid. So far, so good.

Then October arrives, the bookings fall away, and you thank everyone for a great season.

Eight months later, a letter lands. One of them is claiming unpaid holiday going back two summers. And because you have taken the same person on every year since 2022, they have far more employment rights than you ever realised.

Nothing in that story involves a bad employer. It happens because the paperwork was written for the busy months and never thought about the quiet ones. Seasonal staff contracts are the most common weak point we see in hotels, and sorting them out costs a fraction of defending the claim.

Why seasonal staff contracts go wrong more often than any other kind

Permanent contracts get proper attention. Someone will be around for years, so you sit down and do the job properly.

Seasonal hiring works differently. You need eleven people, and you need them by Friday. The contract becomes an afterthought, or worse, last year’s document with the dates changed. Three problems follow, and they compound.

The first is a working pattern that does not survive contact with a real season. The contract says thirty hours a week. August says fifty. October says nine.

The second is that the holiday gets filed under things to sort out later. It never gets sorted out later.

The third is the expensive one. Nobody tracks what happens across seasons. The gap between one summer and the next feels like a clean break. In law, it is very often not.

Get your seasonal staff contracts right, and you keep the flexibility you actually need. Get them wrong, and you have handed a future claimant a beautifully organised bundle of evidence.

Start with the question most hotels skip

Before you choose a contract type, answer this honestly. Do you need this person to be available, or do you need them to be obliged?

Two different things, and they need two different documents. Cover for a head chef on maternity leave is an obligation. A student who works Saturday functions when you ask is an availability arrangement. Use one template for both, and you end up paying for hours nobody worked while losing the flexibility you thought you had bought.

Which seasonal staff contracts suit which role

Four options are worth considering in hospitality, and each earns its place in a different situation.

Fixed-term contracts

Fixed-term is the most common of the seasonal staff contracts we draft for hotels. It runs from a stated date to a stated date, or until a defined task finishes. It suits roles where you know roughly how long you need someone: restaurant staff from April to October, say, or cover during a refurbishment. The end date is built in, so you are never inventing a reason to let somebody go.

Two things to watch. Fixed-term employees must not be treated less favourably than comparable permanent staff on pay, holiday, or access to internal vacancies. An employee kept on successive fixed-term contracts for four continuous years usually becomes permanent by law, unless you can objectively justify the renewal.

Casual and zero-hour contracts

These suit genuine peaks and troughs. Function work, sickness cover, the extra pair of hands on a bank holiday weekend. You offer work, the individual accepts or declines, and there is no mutual obligation in between.

They are perfectly lawful when used honestly. Trouble starts when a zero-hours contract describes somebody who, in practice, works forty hours a week, all year. A tribunal looks at what actually happened rather than what the document claims, and the document stops protecting you. Our guide to what the new rules on zero-hours contracts really mean for your business covers this in more detail.

Annualised hours

Contract the employee for a total number of hours across the year, worked unevenly, with pay spread evenly across twelve months.

It works well where there is a genuine off-season. Your team gets income stability, and you keep trained people instead of recruiting from scratch every March. It takes setting up, and you must track hours so pay never dips below the National Minimum Wage in any pay reference period.

Agency workers

Useful for short, unpredictable gaps. After twelve continuous calendar weeks in the same role, agency workers become entitled to the same basic pay and working conditions as if you had recruited them directly.

Side by side, they look like this.

The clauses your seasonal staff contracts cannot leave out

Whichever route you take, these are the terms that decide whether your seasonal staff contracts hold up when somebody challenges them.

• Clear end arrangements. State the end date or the event that ends the contract, and confirm that employment ends automatically on that date.
• An honest hours clause. If hours vary, give a realistic range rather than a comfortable fiction. If there is no guarantee of work, say so plainly.
• Notice on both sides. Statutory minimum notice starts to apply once somebody has a month of service.
• How holiday accrues and how it is paid. This is the clause that most often costs money.
• Pay, including the rate, the pay reference period, and any accommodation charge.
• Tips and service charge. You need a written tipping policy that is applied fairly. Tipping law changes again in October 2026, when employers must consult workers before creating a policy and review it every three years.
• Shift arrangements. How shifts are allocated, how much notice you give, and what happens when one is cancelled.
• Right to work confirmation. Employment is conditional on evidence of the right to work in the United Kingdom, checked before the first shift, every time.
• Sickness reporting. Who to call and by when. Statutory sick pay is now payable from the first day of absence, and the lower earnings limit was removed on 6 April 2026, so more of your seasonal team will qualify than before.
• Return of property and confidentiality. Uniforms, keys, fobs, and guest information all need covering before somebody walks out in September.

If you want the fuller picture of what sits behind these clauses, our policies and procedures work is where most of it lives.

Holiday accrual, where the money quietly leaks

Everyone who works for you is entitled to paid holiday, not just employees. Casual workers, seasonal staff, and agency workers all have it.

For leave years beginning on or after 1 April 2024, holiday for irregular hours workers and part-year workers accrues at 12.07 per cent of the hours worked in each pay period. That figure is not a rule of thumb. Take 52 weeks, remove the 5.6 weeks of statutory leave, and 46.4 working weeks remain. Divide 5.6 by 46.4, and there it is.

Two things follow. The method applies only to irregular hours and part-year workers, so using it for somebody on regular hours is unlawful and invites an unlawful deduction from wages claim. And you may now pay rolled-up holiday pay to these workers at 12.07 per cent of pay in the period, provided it is itemised separately on the payslip, and you still encourage people to take real time off. Whichever route you choose, your seasonal staff contracts need to say so.

Sophie works variable shifts in your restaurant from May to September. In her June pay period, she works 92 hours. Multiply by 0.1207, and she accrues 11.1 hours of holiday, rounded to 11.

If you use rolled-up holiday pay instead, and she earned 1,169 pounds that period, she receives an extra 141.10 pounds, shown as its own line on her payslip.

Now repeat that across a five-month season, nine workers, and three seasons, and the size of a potential claim comes into focus. Our post on whether you are calculating holiday pay correctly goes through the wider rules on what counts as normal remuneration.

One more thing that is easy to miss. Since 6 April 2026, employers must keep records of annual leave and holiday pay and hold them for at least six years. If your seasonal holiday records live in a manager’s notebook, that needs to change before the next peak.

Continuous service, the one that catches hotels out year after year

Here is the assumption that does the most damage. Season ends, employment ends, clock resets. Next May, the same person walks back in and starts from zero.

Often that is simply wrong, and no wording in your seasonal staff contracts can make it right.

Continuity of employment is governed by sections 210 to 219 of the Employment Rights Act 1996. It survives a gap where there was a temporary cessation of work, or where, by arrangement or custom, the person is regarded as continuing in your employment. A seasonal shutdown is a textbook temporary cessation. Tell somebody in October that you will see them in April, or simply take the same faces back five years running, and a tribunal may well treat those seasons as continuous service.

Why it matters in pounds. Unfair dismissal protection currently requires two years of service. From 1 January 2027 that drops to six months, and the cap on the compensatory award is being removed. A returning seasonal employee will build up dismissal rights in a single season rather than over several. Redundancy pay and notice entitlement work the same way, on continuous service rather than the length of the current contract.

The answer is not to engineer breaks in service. Agreements to disregard continuity do not work, and tribunals see straight through them. Know where you stand, keep a proper record of who worked which seasons, and factor it into how you manage people and end a season.

What is coming in 2027, and why it changes your planning now

The Employment Rights Act 2025 became law on 18 December 2025 and is arriving in stages. According to Acas, three changes that land squarely on hospitality are expected in 2027.

Workers on zero-hour and low-hours contracts will gain the right to be offered guaranteed hours reflecting the hours they usually work, if they want them. Employers will have to give reasonable notice of shifts and of changes to shifts. And workers will be entitled to a payment when a shift is cancelled, moved, or cut short at short notice.

That last one deserves your attention if you are used to sending staff home early on a quiet Tuesday. Once the rules commence, that decision carries a price.

There is good news for genuinely seasonal operations. The legislation recognises short-term labour needs and allows guaranteed hours to be offered on a fixed term rather than a permanent basis where that is reasonable. The detail is still being settled through consultation, so the sensible move is to get your rota records, your shift notice practice, and your seasonal staff contracts into shape now rather than rebuilding everything in a rush later.

If you house your seasonal team

Living in accommodation is common in hotels and carries its own minimum wage trap. Where you provide it, the accommodation offset applies. From 1 April 2026, the daily rate is 11.10 pounds, and the weekly rate is 77.70 pounds.

Charge more than the offset, and the excess comes off pay for minimum wage purposes, which can quietly push somebody below the legal rate. Your seasonal staff contracts should set out the charge in plain terms so nobody is surprised by their first payslip. With the National Living Wage at 12.71 pounds an hour for workers aged 21 and over, and 10.85 pounds for those aged 18 to 20, the margin for error is thin. Check the arithmetic before the season starts, not after an inspection.

Your pre-season checklist

Run through this before the next intake, and your seasonal staff contracts will be in far better shape than most.

• Every seasonal worker has a written contract issued on or before their first day.
• The contract type matches how the role genuinely works, not how it is convenient to describe it.
• Right-to-work checks are completed and recorded before the first shift.
• The holiday method is stated in writing, with 12.07 per cent used only for irregular hours and part-year workers.
• Rolled-up holiday pay, if used, appears as a separate itemised line on payslips.
• Holiday records sit in a system you can still retrieve from in six years.
• You have a record of who worked which seasons and how long each gap was.
• Shift notice and cancellation practices are written down and actually followed.
• Your tipping policy is documented, fair, and reviewed.
• Accommodation charges are checked against the offset and against minimum wage.

Getting this right before the next peak

Seasonal staff contracts are not a compliance chore. They are the difference between flexibility you can rely on and flexibility that turns out to be imaginary the moment somebody challenges it. The hotels that sail through their peaks are almost always the ones that sorted the paperwork out in the quiet months.

If your contracts were written for a different era of your business, or the 2027 changes have you wondering what they mean for your rotas, we can help. We work with hotel operators on exactly this, and we do the work rather than just telling you what needs doing. Have a look at our employment contracts service, or read more about how we support HR for hotels.

Book a free consultation call or get in touch, and we will tell you honestly whether you have a problem worth fixing.