What the clock is for
Under the Agency Workers Regulations 2010, an agency worker becomes entitled to equal treatment on basic pay and conditions after twelve calendar weeks in the same role with the same hirer reg 7. Separately, access to the hirer's collective facilities and to information about vacancies applies from day one and is not governed by the clock at all.
What counts as a week
A calendar week in which the worker worked at all counts as a qualifying week. One shift in a week is a week. This surprises people who expect the count to track hours, and it is the reason a worker on two days a week reaches equal treatment on exactly the same date as one on five.
The rule that actually catches people
Continuity breaks where the worker is away for more than six calendar weeks reg 7(8). Read that carefully, because the common mistake is expensive in both directions:
- A break of six weeks or fewer pauses the clock. The weeks already banked survive, and the count resumes where it left off.
- A break of seven weeks or more resets it. The worker starts again at one.
Late and out-of-order approvals
Clients do not sign off timesheets in order. A week approved after a later one is normal, and any system that accumulates a running total as approvals arrive will discard it for being older than the last one counted. The position has to be derived from the whole set of approved weeks every time, not nudged forward on each approval. Otherwise the number on the screen depends on the order the client happened to click, which is not a defensible basis for a legal entitlement.
What the records must show
- Which weeks were worked, per placement, with the hirer and role identified, because the clock is per role per hirer rather than per worker.
- The gaps, so continuity can be reasoned about rather than assumed.
- The position as it stood on a past date, since a challenge is always about a date in the past.
- What the thresholds were at the time, which matters now that Make Work Pay has reopened the AWR.
BookKept derives the clock, it does not tally it
Every approval recalculates the position from the full set of signed-off weeks, so a week approved late lands in its true place in the sequence. The break is counted as weeks actually missed rather than the distance between them, with reg 7(8) semantics named in the tests. The thresholds themselves are versioned configuration carrying an effective date and their source, so a Make Work Pay outcome changes a pack rather than the arithmetic, and the position on any past date stays reconstructable.