IF YOU HAVE LOST YOUR JOB
What to deal with first
Eleven things, in the order the clock puts them in. Three of them have deadlines and the rest do not, which is the only thing this page is really telling you.
There is a clock on these
Not because they matter most, but because waiting costs you something on these three and not on the others.
Money coming in
There is a clock on this one, and it is the reason it is first. What you can claim, and from when, depends on when you claim rather than on when the job ended.
Use the government's checker to see what applies to you, before anything else on this page.
GOV.UK: check what benefits you can get (opens in a new tab)
If you think the dismissal was wrong
Time limits here are short, they run from your last day, and nobody is obliged to tell you about them. That is true whether or not you end up doing anything about it.
Read ACAS's early conciliation page now and find out what the current limit is. Deciding later is fine; finding out later is not.
Your final pay and unused holiday
Holiday you did not take is usually money, and final pay is the thing most likely to be wrong in a hurried exit. It is much easier to query in the first week than in the second month.
Check the final payslip against what you were owed, and raise anything that looks wrong in writing.
ACAS: final pay when someone leaves a job (opens in a new tab)
Money you are owed, and what decides it
Days rather than weeks. Each of these is easier to sort out while everybody still remembers the details.
Notice
What you are owed for notice depends on your contract and on how long you were there, and it is separate from anything else you are paid on the way out.
Find your contract and check what it says about notice, then check that against the rules.
Redundancy pay, if that is what this was
Redundancy is a specific thing with its own rules, and being told a role is redundant does not by itself make it one.
Read what redundancy means and what it entitles you to, and use the calculator to see what the statutory figure would be.
If the employer has gone under
An insolvent employer changes who pays you and how you claim it. Nothing about the ordinary route applies.
Read the government's page on what happens to what you are owed when an employer is insolvent.
GOV.UK: your rights if your employer is insolvent (opens in a new tab)
Your pension
The pot does not disappear when the job does. It stops being paid into, and it is easy to lose track of a scheme you never look at.
Find the scheme's name and your member number now, while you still have the paperwork and the email address.
Real, and it will keep
Worth doing, and nothing here gets worse for being done next week.
References
What a previous employer can and cannot say is narrower than most people expect, in both directions.
Ask who will handle references, and get the name of a person rather than a department while you still know somebody there.
Equipment and accounts
Returning things and losing access are the two halves of the same week, and the second one usually happens first.
Get anything you need out of a work account before it closes, and agree in writing how equipment goes back.
Your own documents
Contracts, payslips, appraisals and the note somebody sent about a piece of work you did well. All of it is easier to collect now than to ask for later.
Put the contract, the last few payslips and anything about your own work somewhere that is not a work system.
Starting to look
It is last on this page on purpose. The things above have clocks on them and this one does not, and starting a search while a claim is unmade is the expensive order to do it in.
When you are ready, what to have ready and where to search are on this site.
What this page is
A list of what to deal with and where the answers are. It is not legal advice, and no rule, limit or amount is stated on it. Those change, and the versions that count are the ones GOV.UK and ACAS publish.
ACAS also answers questions by phone, which is worth knowing if reading a website is not what today is for.