Your employer kept your commission. What the law actually says.

General guidance for UK employees, covering Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Not legal advice. Last reviewed: 30 July 2026. How this guidance is produced.

You hit the numbers. The deals landed. Then the commission did not, or it arrived short, or you were told the scheme was discretionary and that was the end of the conversation. Perhaps you were performance-managed out first and the money went with you.

Most people let this go. That is understandable, and it is usually the wrong call, because withheld commission sits on a completely different legal footing from the rest of an exit dispute. It is the cleanest money on the table, and almost nobody realises why.

The three things that make commission different

Set aside everything you have read about unfair dismissal. A commission claim is a separate route with its own rules, and those rules are unusually favourable.

One. There is no qualifying period. This is the point most people get wrong, and getting it wrong costs them the claim. The two-year service rule that everyone has heard of applies to ordinary unfair dismissal. It does not apply here. A claim for unlawful deduction of wages is available from day one of your employment. Six weeks in the job, six months, six years, it makes no difference to whether the route is open.

Two. It survives a fair dismissal. Your employer may have had a perfectly good reason to let you go and may have run a flawless process. That does not entitle them to keep money that was properly payable to you. The two questions are separate. You can lose the argument about your exit entirely and still be owed the commission.

Three. Commission is named in the statute. You are not arguing by analogy. Section 27 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 defines wages to include "any fee, bonus, commission, holiday pay or other emolument referable to his employment, whether payable under his contract or otherwise". Commission is wages. It is written down.

The legal route, in plain terms

Section 13 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 says an employer must not make a deduction from a worker's wages unless it is required or authorised by statute or by a term of the contract, or the worker has previously given written consent.

If a sum was properly payable to you and it was not paid, the shortfall is treated as a deduction. You complain to an employment tribunal under section 23.

The words that carry all the weight are properly payable. That is the whole battleground, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise. See the section on discretionary schemes below.

The three-month clock, and why it is the urgent part

A tribunal will not consider a deduction complaint unless it is presented before the end of three months beginning with the date of the payment from which the deduction was made.

Read that carefully. The clock runs from the payment, not from the day you noticed, not from the day you left, and not from the day the argument with HR broke down. People lose good claims waiting for an internal process to conclude.

Two things soften it. Where there is a series of deductions, the three months runs from the last one in the series, not the first. And a tribunal can extend the limit where it was not reasonably practicable to claim in time, though that is an exception and a bad thing to plan around.

Before you can lodge a tribunal claim you must notify ACAS and go through early conciliation. That pauses the clock while conciliation runs. In Northern Ireland the equivalent step is through the Labour Relations Agency.

How far back you can reach, and the Northern Ireland difference

This is where the two jurisdictions come apart, and it matters more than almost anything else on this page.

In Great Britain, two years. The Deduction from Wages (Limitation) Regulations 2014 inserted a backstop into section 23. A series of deductions claim cannot reach further back than two years from the claim, however long the underpayment actually ran.

In Northern Ireland, there is no backstop at all. Northern Ireland never made an equivalent instrument. The Supreme Court confirmed the consequence in Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland v Agnew [2023] UKSC 33, holding that the Northern Ireland limitation provisions are more favourable to a claimant. The series in that case reached back to 1998.

So a Northern Ireland salesperson with a long-running commission underpayment may be able to reach very substantially further back than an identical claimant in England, Scotland or Wales. That is the opposite of what most people assume, and no guidance written for Great Britain will tell you.

The honest part: discretionary schemes

Here is where we part company with most of what you will read online.

A great many commission and bonus schemes are drafted as discretionary. Many also contain a clause saying you must still be employed, or not under notice, on the payment date. Those clauses are there precisely to defeat a claim like yours, and often they do.

Whether a discretionary scheme can be challenged is genuinely fact-specific. It turns on the exact wording of your scheme and contract, and on how the scheme has actually been operated over time. Arguments run in both directions and we are not going to tell you it is straightforward, because for a lot of schemes it is not.

What we will say plainly is this. If a meaningful sum is at stake, the wording of your commission scheme is the single thing most worth putting in front of a qualified employment solicitor. An hour spent on that document is worth more than anything else you can buy, including anything we sell.

Where this sits if you are being managed out

Commission disputes rarely arrive alone. Usually the money goes missing around an exit, and the exit is being run through a process.

If a performance plan has landed, the PIP page covers what the employer has to do to make a capability process fair. Capability is a potentially fair reason for dismissal under section 98 of the Employment Rights Act 1996, but only where the process holds up. The ACAS Code of Practice states at paragraph 1 that disciplinary situations include misconduct and poor performance, so poor performance is squarely within its scope.

One honest caveat, because it affects money. Where an employer runs a separate capability procedure rather than a disciplinary one, the Code's own foreword says the basic principles of fairness should still be followed. That leaves a real argument about how much of the detailed procedure applies, and therefore about whether a tribunal uplift is available. Treat an uplift as arguable, not as a certainty.

If an exit offer is already on the table, the settlement page covers what to check before you sign, and the calculator shows what an offer is really worth after tax. Unpaid commission is a live item in that negotiation, and it is a much stronger card when you have already put it in writing.

What to do this week

In order.

• Find the scheme document, your contract, and every payslip and statement covering the disputed period. Save copies somewhere that is not your work laptop or work email.
• Work out the exact date of the payment you say was short. That date starts your three months.
• Put the claim in writing to your employer, calmly and specifically, with the figures and the dates. A verbal complaint to a manager is not a paper trail.
• If the sum is meaningful, get the scheme wording reviewed by an employment solicitor before the clock runs down.
• If you are in Northern Ireland, do not assume the two-year limit applies to you. It may well not.

The third step is the one that changes your position, and it is the one people skip. A written grievance turns a disagreement into a documented dispute the employer has to answer, on a date you can point to.

If you are in Northern Ireland, read this

Employment law is devolved. Northern Ireland has its own statute, its own code and its own tribunals, and our kits are written for the law of England, Wales and Scotland. Some of what they say does not transfer. The differences that matter most:

• The right and the route are equivalent but sit in different legislation. Part IV of the Employment Rights (Northern Ireland) Order 1996, with the complaint at Article 55 and the definition of wages at Article 59.
• The time limit is also three months, running from the last deduction in a series, with early conciliation through the Labour Relations Agency rather than ACAS.
• There is no two-year backstop, as set out above.
• The qualifying period for ordinary unfair dismissal is one year, not two. Great Britain moved to two years in April 2012 and Northern Ireland did not follow.
• The applicable code is the Labour Relations Agency Code of Practice, not the ACAS Code, and a tribunal may adjust an award by up to 50% for unreasonable failure to follow it, against 25% in Great Britain.
• A statutory three-step dismissal and disciplinary procedure still applies in Northern Ireland. Great Britain abolished its equivalent in 2009. Where that procedure is not completed and the failure is mainly the employer's fault, the dismissal can be automatically unfair.
• Claims are heard by Industrial Tribunals, not Employment Tribunals.

We are telling you this because it is true and because most guidance will not. If you are in Northern Ireland, take advice locally and speak to the Labour Relations Agency.

One change coming, and it does not apply everywhere

From 1 January 2027, commenced by SI 2026/559 under the Employment Rights Act 2025, the qualifying period for ordinary unfair dismissal in Great Britain drops from two years to six months, and the cap on the compensatory award is repealed.

That does not change the commission position, which already has no qualifying period. It changes what else you may have alongside it. Anyone with between six months and two years of service is about to acquire a right they do not have today.

It extends to England, Wales and Scotland only. It does not reach Northern Ireland, where the qualifying period stays at one year.