Reg 15 and Reg 17 Explained: A Plain-English Guide for UK Agencies

If you place temporary or contract workers in the UK, Regulation 15 and Regulation 17 are not optional paperwork — they are legal obligations under the Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses Regulations 2003. They are also, in our experience, the two requirements agencies most often get subtly wrong, because the rules are precise and the manual process is tedious enough that corners get cut.

This is a plain-English walkthrough, not legal advice — if you need a definitive ruling on your specific setup, take proper advice. But for the day-to-day reality of getting these right at scale, here is what you need to know.

First, the bigger picture: the Conduct Regulations

The Conduct Regulations govern how employment agencies and employment businesses operate in the UK. A key distinction runs through them: an employment agency introduces candidates for permanent roles (the worker becomes the client's employee), while an employment business supplies temporary workers who remain the business's workers. Reg 15 and Reg 17 are obligations that bite for employment businesses supplying temps and contractors.

Regulation 15: Assignment Confirmation

Regulation 15 requires that, before a temporary worker starts an assignment, the employment business confirms the terms of that specific assignment in writing. It is the assignment-level detail that sits alongside the worker's overarching terms.

A Reg 15 assignment confirmation typically needs to cover:

• The identity of the client (the hirer).
• The date the assignment is to start and its likely duration.
• The type of work, location, and hours.
• The rate of pay and how and when the worker will be paid.
• Any expenses payable, and the notice the worker is entitled to give and receive.

Regulation 17… and the Key Information Document

This is where terminology trips people up. Historically, Regulation 17 concerns the requirement not to withhold payment to a worker on certain grounds. But in everyday agency conversation, "Reg 17 document" is very often used loosely to mean the Key Information Document (KID) — a separate, newer obligation introduced in April 2020 that has become central to temp compliance.

Because the KID is what most agencies actually mean when they talk about this stage of documentation, it is worth covering properly.

What the Key Information Document must contain

The KID must be provided to a work-seeker *before* agreeing terms, and must set out, in a clear standardised format:

• Who is paying the worker (the employment business or an intermediary/umbrella).
• The type of contract and the minimum rate of pay.
• How the worker is paid and by whom, and the intervals.
• Any deductions or fees that will be taken from pay (including umbrella and statutory deductions).
• A representative example illustrating gross-to-net pay, so the worker sees the real take-home effect of any intermediary.
• Any non-monetary benefits and holiday entitlement.

Why doing this by hand does not scale

Each of these documents draws on data you already hold — the worker, the client, the assignment terms, the pay and deductions. Producing them manually means re-keying that data into a template per placement, which is slow, and worse, error-prone: a wrong rate, a stale client name, a missing deduction line. At volume, the manual approach guarantees that *some* documents will be wrong.

Compliance that depends on a busy consultant remembering to generate the right document, correctly, for every assignment, is not compliance. It is hope.

What your CRM should do

• Generate the Reg 15 assignment confirmation automatically per placement, pre-filled from the placement record.
• Produce a compliant KID including the gross-to-net illustrative example, reflecting the actual pay route and deductions.
• Keep a versioned audit trail of what was issued, when, and to whom.
• Flag missing or incomplete documentation before a worker starts, not after.

The takeaway

Reg 15, Reg 17, and the KID are not hard to understand — but they are easy to get subtly wrong and painful to do by hand at volume. The agencies that stay clean are the ones whose software produces the right document, correctly, every time, without relying on anyone to remember. If your current tool leaves this to manual effort, it is worth asking why. See also our guide to UK GDPR for recruitment agencies and why UK agencies are leaving enterprise CRMs that charge extra for compliance.