The advert says hybrid. That is not yet a term of your contract.

You accept a job advertised as hybrid, three days in the office. Nine months later an email announces four. You go back and reread the advert, and it says exactly what you remember it saying.

The advert is not the thing that binds anyone. It is a description of what the employer was doing on the day they wrote it. Where you work is a term of your employment, and terms live somewhere else.

What you are owed in writing, and when

Great Britain does not leave this to chance. Section 1 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 lists the particulars a worker must be given in writing, and place of work is one of them. The wording anticipates the case where there is no single office:

either the place of work or, where the worker is required or permitted to work at various places, an indication of that and of the address of the employer

That is section 1(4)(h), and the Act says those particulars "must be included in a single document".¹ So the employer cannot simply leave the question open. They have to commit something to paper.

Then the timing, which is what matters to anyone still deciding. The statement "must be given not later than the beginning of the employment".¹

Day one. Plenty of employers send the wording earlier, with the offer or the draft contract, and nothing stops them. But what the Act guarantees you is a document that can arrive after you accepted, after you resigned from the job you had, and after you moved — after every decision that depended on it.

An advert is a description, and rarely a promise

Nothing in that duty says an advert has to match what you are later handed. What section 1 regulates is the information an employer must put in writing once you are employed, not what they may say in order to attract you. "Hybrid, 3 days in office" is the employer reporting their current arrangement, in the same register as "friendly team".

That is not the same as saying an advert never counts for anything, and it would be wrong to read the Act's silence that far. Whether a specific commitment made during recruitment becomes part of the agreement, or gives you a claim when it turns out to be untrue, is a question of contract law, and the answer turns on how precisely the thing was put and on what you can show was said. If you took a job because of a clearly stated location arrangement that the employer then dropped, that is worth putting to a union representative or a local adviser rather than writing off. It is simply a much weaker place to stand than having the arrangement in the document you signed, because it turns on what was said, by whom, and how specifically.

That leaves a question with real consequences: is the pattern in your contract, or in a policy? The two look identical from your desk on the first morning. They differ when someone wants to change them. Exactly how much a contractual term protects you turns on the term and on the facts, and this article cannot settle it, but the direction seems clear enough to us: changing a term you agreed to is a heavier act than rewriting a document the employer owns. Which of the two you have is a fact about your particular offer, and it is knowable in advance, because you can ask.

Most candidates do not, and the reason is understandable. Asking feels like distrust at exactly the moment you want to seem easy to work with. But you are not asking the employer to promise more than they mean. You are asking them to write down what they already told you.

The questions that are worth asking before you sign

Ask for the place-of-work wording itself, not a summary of it. Two different documents can come back, and they are not the same thing. The written statement is one the employer owes you, and section 1 imposes that duty without making the statement itself the bargain: it is a record of particulars, not the agreement.¹ The contract is what the two of you agreed. Usually they say the same thing, and where they do not, which one governs is a question for national law. So it is worth knowing which of the two you have been sent, and asking for the other if the arrangement matters to you. A refusal to show you the clause is itself informative.

Then, if the arrangement matters to you:

• Is the number of office days in the contract, or in a policy? If it is in a policy, who can change it, and with how much notice?
• How are the days counted? Three a week, three averaged over a month and three with two of them fixed on named days are different jobs.
• Is your place of work stated as an address, as your home, or as both?
• If you will work from a different country than the employer's, say so before you sign. That one opens several doors at once — tax, social security, the right to work there at all, and the employment protections of the country you are actually working in, which can apply whatever the contract says it is governed by. Not a thing to discover in your first payslip, and worth advice specific to the two countries involved.

None of this requires a lawyer, and none of it is an unusual thing to ask a recruiter. It is the last point at which the answer costs the employer nothing.

Afterwards, it usually becomes a request

Once you have started, the conversation changes shape. There is one large exception, and it falls straight out of the distinction above.

If the office pattern itself is a term of your contract and the employer now wants you in more often, they are proposing to change your contract. Read that condition strictly, and in both directions. A contract that names an office as your place of work, while leaving the split between home and office days to a policy, has not by that fact alone made the split contractual. But a policy is not automatically outside the contract either: a contract can incorporate one by reference, or say in terms that it binds, and then changing it is changing the agreement. So the question is not which document the days live in. It is whether the days form part of what you agreed — which is why it is worth asking to see the wording of both. That is their variation to justify, and not something you are obliged to turn into a request of your own that can be refused on business grounds. What an employer has to do before altering an agreed term is worth asking a union representative or an adviser about, but the starting position is stronger than anything described below. Keep the two apart: the statutory route is for when you want to change your terms, or when the arrangement was never a term to begin with.

That second case is the common one, and in Great Britain it has a statutory form worth seeing whole, because the machinery is the point.

One boundary first, because it is easy to miss and the word "UK" hides it. The Employment Rights Act 1996 says of itself that it "extends to England and Wales and Scotland but not to Northern Ireland".² Employment law is devolved there and Northern Ireland runs its own scheme, so nothing in the rest of this section is a statement about your rights if you work in Belfast rather than Bristol. Read it as the shape of the thing and check the Northern Irish version.

One thing to check before reading further: this right belongs to employees. The written particulars above are owed to workers, a wider group, but the statutory request in Part 8A is narrower, so a worker who is not an employee has the first without the second.⁴

Employees can ask from the first day: GOV.UK states that "employees can make a request for flexible working from their first day in a job", and the statutory request explicitly covers where you work, not only when.³ You may make two applications to the same employer in any 12-month period.⁴ The employer has two months from the date of the application to decide, unless you agree to a longer period,⁴ and the Acas Code of Practice that took effect on 6 April 2024 is blunt that this includes any appeal: all requests, "including any appeals, must be decided and communicated to the employee within a period of two months from when the employer first receives the request".⁶

Before refusing, they have to talk to you. Section 80G of the Employment Rights Act 1996 says an employer "shall not refuse the application unless the employee has been consulted about the application",⁵ and the Code repeats it as a duty rather than a courtesy: "employers must not reject a request without first consulting the employee".⁶

But they can refuse, on any of eight business grounds: the burden of additional costs, a detrimental effect on the ability to meet customer demand, an inability to reorganise work among existing staff, an inability to recruit additional staff, a detrimental impact on quality, a detrimental impact on performance, insufficiency of work during the periods you propose to work, and planned structural changes. The Secretary of State may add more by regulations.⁴ Those are broad categories of business judgement, and what the statute specifies in fine detail is the procedure rather than the conclusion: the clock, the consultation, the number of goes you get.

There is also no statutory right of appeal. The Acas Code says so directly, and recommends offering one as good practice.⁶

Those eight grounds do not, however, answer everything. If your reason for working from home relates to a disability, the Equality Act 2010 imposes a separate duty on the same employer, running on a different test. Where a provision, criterion or practice "puts a disabled person at a substantial disadvantage in relation to a relevant matter in comparison with persons who are not disabled", the employer must "take such steps as it is reasonable to have to take to avoid the disadvantage".⁷ Falling short of that is not a refused request: section 21 says the employer "discriminates against a disabled person if A fails to comply with that duty".⁷ Whether the duty is engaged by a particular attendance rule turns on facts this article cannot know, and the Act draws the same Great Britain boundary as the rest of this section.⁷ What matters here is the shape: an adjustment is owed if it is reasonable, and routing the conversation through the flexible working procedure does not convert it into something refusable on business grounds. One condition is worth knowing precisely because it is in your hands. The duty does not bite on an employer who "does not know, and could not reasonably be expected to know", that you are disabled and likely to be put at the disadvantage.⁹ So telling them, in writing, is not merely good practice — it is the step that can bring the duty into play at all. Use the word adjustment, keep the record, and get advice from someone who can see your facts.

Disability is not the only characteristic that can matter here, which is worth saying plainly because the flexible working procedure gives no hint of it. Section 19 of the same Act treats a provision, criterion or practice as discriminatory where it applies to everyone, disadvantages people who share a protected characteristic, disadvantages you as one of them, and the employer "cannot show it to be a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim". The characteristics listed there include age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation.⁸ Whether an office-attendance rule crosses that line is fact-specific and this article cannot tell you. The point is only that the eight business grounds are answers to a flexible working request, and a request is not the only thing a rule about where you work can be.

So the day-one right is a right to ask, specified in unusual procedural detail. It is not a right to receive. The asymmetry between that and a sentence in your contract is the whole argument for spending twenty minutes on the question before you sign.

An amendment made by the Employment Rights Act 2025 would add a requirement that a refusal also be reasonable. As of today legislation.gov.uk records that substitution as commenced only "for specified purposes", so it is on the statute book without yet being shown as fully in force, and it is not something to plan a decision around.⁵

When you are reading a lot of postings and trying to work out which ones are worth the effort of applying, JobCraftly will read them for you and tell you why each one fits. It cannot tell you what is in the contract behind the advert. Nothing can, until you ask.

What to take from this

You get two moments. The first is the stretch before you accept, when a question costs nothing and the answer can be written down. Note where it ends: an unconditional offer accepted by email or over the phone can form the contract before anyone signs anything, so the moment to ask is while you are still deciding, not while you are waiting for the paperwork. It is not a hard door either — terms can still be changed later by agreement — but that needs the employer to agree, and before acceptance you have something to trade. What the second one looks like depends partly on what the first left you with. If the pattern was part of what you agreed, an employer who wants it changed is proposing a variation and has to justify it. If it was not, you are in a procedure with a two-month clock and eight ways to say no.

Discrimination law sits alongside both, and does not wait to find out which one you are in. An adjustment is measured by whether it is reasonable, and a rule that disadvantages people sharing a protected characteristic has to be proportionate, whatever your contract happens to say about the days.

The first one is much better, and it closes when you say yes.