Guide · Time limits

Continuing acts in discrimination claims

Discrimination rarely happens once. When treatment carries on over months or years, the law can treat it as one continuing act — with time running from the end, not the beginning. When it can't, each incident carries its own three-month clock. Which side of that line your situation falls on can decide whether years of treatment are in the claim or out of it.

The rule

The Equality Act's time limit runs from the date of the act complained of — but the Act itself says that conduct extending over a period is to be treated as done at the end of the period. So where a course of discriminatory conduct counts as one extended act, the three-month clock (less one day, and subject to the ACAS pause) starts when the conduct ends, and the whole course of it comes within the claim — including incidents that would, on their own, be years out of time.

There's a companion rule for failures to act: a decision not to do something is generally treated as made when the person decides, and the law supplies assumptions about when that happens. Omissions — the promotion never offered, the adjustment never made — have their own timing subtleties, which is worth knowing exists even though the detail is beyond this guide.

What counts as "conduct extending over a period"

The courts' touchstone is whether the incidents evidence a continuing discriminatory state of affairs — an ongoing situation or regime for which the employer is responsible — rather than a string of unconnected one-off decisions. Things that tend to point towards a continuing act:

• The same treatment, or a linked pattern of treatment, recurring over time — ongoing harassment by the same colleagues, sustained exclusion, a rule or practice applied to you month after month;
• The same people, or the same management chain, involved throughout;
• A policy, practice or culture operating continuously, rather than isolated decisions taken at intervals.

Things that tend to point the other way:

• Discrete, self-contained decisions — a rejected promotion in January, an unrelated disciplinary sanction in September — even where you believe the same underlying prejudice drove both;
• Long gaps with genuinely nothing in between;
• Different decision-makers acting independently of one another.

One trap deserves its own sentence: an act with continuing consequences is not a continuing act. A one-off decision that keeps hurting — a demotion whose lower pay recurs every month — is generally treated as done when decided, not as extending over the period you feel its effects. The distinction is between conduct that continues and damage that continues, and tribunals police it.

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Why this matters even if you're "in time"

People sometimes assume this doctrine only matters for rescuing old incidents. It also shapes what a claim is worth and what story it can tell: if the earlier incidents come in as part of one continuing act, the tribunal hears the whole pattern — and patterns are how discrimination is usually proved, since direct evidence is rare. Conversely, if they're excluded, they may still be admissible as background evidence, but not as claims carrying their own remedy. How the incidents are framed when a claim is drafted is consequential, which is one of the stronger reasons to get advice before drafting rather than after.

If your earliest incidents look out of time

Two doors remain: the continuing-act argument above, and the tribunal's discretion to extend time where it is just and equitable — the more flexible of the two statutory extension tests, covered in our out-of-time guide. Claims are often argued in the alternative: this was one continuing act, and if not, time should be extended. What both doors reward is the same thing: a clear, dated chronology of every incident. Start one today — our evidence guide explains how — because whichever argument your case ends up needing, the chronology is its spine.

Where to take the actual question

Whether your incidents form a continuing act is a judgment on your specific facts — the people involved, the gaps, the links between events — and precisely what this site doesn't answer. ACAS (0300 123 1100), your union, Citizens Advice, a law centre, or a regulated adviser can look at your chronology and give you a view. Take the chronology with you; it will double the value of the conversation.