When must an employment contract be for a period no longer than a year, and which contracts does the text place outside that ceiling?
General information · Not legal advice
Material to check
The document to read is the employment contract itself, for the term it states and whether it names a period at all, and any schedule or project description attached to it showing what undertaking the term was set against.
These are types of material to look for, not evidence already verified by PRO SE.
Where readings differ
One reading works from the contract's own form: an employment contract with no period fixed, or one for the period needed to complete a certain undertaking, may run as the parties wrote it, while any other fixed-term contract may not exceed a year, and the exceptions are shown by the instrument rather than by a later finding.
Another reading notes that the ceiling is expressed as the residue after the two exceptions, so it turns on whether a named undertaking is certain and whether the term was genuinely needed for completing it; the provision does not say who decides either point, and a contract styled as project work without an identifiable project does not establish the exception on its face.
Your judgment
If the contract names a project but sets a term, what in the file shows that undertaking was certain and that term needed for its completion?
PRO SE does not make this decision or keep a case record on this public site.When to reconsider
We look at this again if the provision is amended to exempt further categories of work from the ceiling, or if a decision identifies when a term counts as needed for the completion of a certain undertaking.