3 things to do before the Employment Rights Act Spring 2027 deadline

Spring next year might still feel a long way off, but there are three things your reward team should be nailing down now before a crucial deadline.

Under the Employment Rights Act 2025, large employers (250 or more employees) will be required to publish equality action plans alongside their gender pay gap data, covering two specific areas: what they're doing to close their gender pay gap, and how they're supporting employees through menopause.

The requirement is voluntary from this year, becoming mandatory from spring 2027.

This isn't a box-ticking form, it's a public document that has to say something true about your organisation, backed by data and signed off by senior leadership.

Here are the three actions worth starting now:

1. Build a menopause action plan, not a menopause statement

A menopause action plan needs to name at least one concrete action, but a single awareness session or leaflet won't hold up to scrutiny, from employees, from the media, or from your own senior leadership a year from now.

A credible plan is built on real data (how many of your people are likely to be affected, and where they sit in the business), backed by manager training, and includes an actual route to clinical support, not just a policy statement that support "is available."

With around one in ten women leaving work altogether because of menopause symptoms, often at the peak of their seniority, the plans that make a measurable difference are the ones with a genuine support pathway behind them, not just a document.

If you're starting from scratch, Fertifa's Menopause Action Plan Framework is a useful base for the menopause side of the plan, giving you a framework to adapt rather than a blank page.

2. Build a gender pay gap action plan tied to retention

It's tempting to build a gender pay gap plan entirely around hiring, more women in the pipeline, blind CVs, better job ads. But pay gaps are often driven just as much by attrition at senior levels, and one of the most common, least discussed reasons experienced women leave is a lack of support through menopause, fertility treatment or the return from parental leave.

A plan that only looks at who you're bringing in, and ignores why experienced women are leaving, will move the needle far more slowly than one that tackles both.

Pulling apart your pay gap by grade, tenure and function, and looking at where drop-off happens, is the starting point for an action plan that will genuinely narrow the gap rather than just document it.

Fertifa's Gender Pay Gap Action Plan Guide walks through how to build a plan around this kind of retention data, not just recruitment metrics.

3. Bring in clinical support to help action your plans

As a reproductive health and neurodiversity benefits provider, we fill the space between PMI provision and general practice healthcare, giving employees clinically-led access to expert care for menopause, fertility and family-forming, men's and women's health, mental wellbeing, neurodiversity, gender identity, lifestyle health and infant care.

For these action plans specifically, that means real clinical support behind both requirements: specialist menopause and hormonal health care, fertility treatment support, and mental health provision, so what you publish in spring 2027 isn't a document making promises, it's a description of support that's already live in your business.

That means access to specialists your employees can actually book, manager training your people use, and the kind of data on uptake and outcomes that makes your next action plan easier to write than this one.