What Happens When the Fair Work Agency Inspects You

The Fair Work Agency took over labour-market enforcement on 7 April 2026. It published its enforcement policy the same day, so you can read exactly how it says it'll enforce. What you can't see yet is how it behaves in practice. By late May 2026 it hadn't announced a single inspection, underpayment notice, or naming round.

Most of the policy is old news in new packaging. The minimum-wage rules, the powers, the penalties: they all applied under HMRC and the agencies the FWA absorbed. One rule is worth ten minutes today. The rest you can skim.

The clock starts at first contact

An FWA wage check normally starts the moment an officer first contacts you about it. A nudge to check your own pay doesn't count; the clock starts when they open the actual check. Fix an underpayment before that and you usually dodge a Notice of Underpayment. Leave it until the check has started and the notice stands, even if you pay every penny back the next morning, even if the shortfall was an honest mistake. HMRC, which still runs these checks under contract, draws the same line: the start date is the day they get in touch.

So this isn't a problem you deal with when they show up. By the time they show up, the window's closed. Get your rotas, hours, and pay records straight now, on your schedule.

How a check starts

Two ways. Someone complains: a current worker, a former one, or anyone at all, anonymously, through the government's pay-and-work-rights form. Or the FWA comes looking, working from data and tip-offs about sectors it considers high-risk.

A visit is usually arranged in advance. The agency can arrive unannounced, and it can skip the visit and demand your digital records instead. But unannounced isn't the norm. Notice is.

What they can ask for

An officer can enter any premises where work happens. No warrant needed. That's only for a home, which covers staff accommodation. Once inside they can demand documents, inspect your records, open the systems that hold your employment data, question anyone on site, and take documents away. They can look back six years.

For a pub, restaurant, or hotel that's your rota, your time-and-attendance, your payroll, your contracts. Point-of-sale too, if that's where the hours live, though the policy doesn't name it specifically. If a system knows who worked when and what they were paid, expect them to want it.

The records a wage check lives or dies on

• Payroll proving minimum-wage compliance for every pay period, including the accommodation offset if you house staff
• Hours actually worked, not hours rostered
• A contract or written statement for every worker
• Written confirmation from every agency you use that it pays the minimum wage
• Paid training time, because training counts as work

Getting in the way is a crime

This part is genuinely new. Obstruct an officer or hand over false documents and you've committed a criminal offence under Part 5 of the Employment Rights Act 2025: a fine, up to 51 weeks inside, or both. And it's personal. A director who consents to it, or lets it happen through neglect, is personally liable; the company is no shield. A boss who tells a manager to bury the records can't hide behind it.

The policy is blunt about what won't wash on the day. "I need to call my lawyer first," with no reason why, doesn't count. Neither does "the boss isn't in" or "it's not convenient." Cooperate, write down what you hand over, and call your adviser while it happens. Don't stall.

Where hospitality actually stands

The FWA hasn't said it's coming for pubs and restaurants. Its launch-week talk was about construction and social care. Don't read that as a pass. The government's own figures put hospitality among the worst sectors for underpaying the minimum wage, and the FWA's own Working Lives report (May 2026) called the sector out for how often staff are underpaid and go without a payslip. No pub or restaurant has been named. The data keeps pointing this way anyway.

What still isn't written down

No delivery plan for the agency's first year. No step-by-step playbook for employers. Nothing written for hospitality. No grace period beyond fixing things before a check starts. The power to take a worker's case to tribunal on their behalf is in the Act but switched off for now. And the minimum wage is still enforced by HMRC, under contract, until the full handover in April 2027. For what the FWA does and doesn't cover, see our FWA briefing.

What the minimum wage actually requires

The April 2026 rates: £12.71 for 21 and over, £10.85 for 18 to 20, £8.00 for under-18s and apprentices. The accommodation offset is £11.10 a day. Training hours are paid hours. Keep the records six years. Make sure your rota and time systems capture the hours people actually worked, not the ones you scheduled.

None of this is new. What's new is one agency holding all the powers, and a clock that starts the day it opens a check.