Original research
The Global Notice Period Index
A per-jurisdiction record of what a named government authority says about the notice an employee owes when they resign — with the source, its tier, and the date it was last checked. Eight jurisdictions have a record. Four are verified. Everywhere else is marked “not covered” rather than guessed at.
This page describes the state of the research itself — coverage, sources and process — not the law of any one country. Every country-specific claim lives on that country’s own page, cited individually.
General information only. Employment rules depend on your contract and location.
Published by QuitWithoutNotice
First, three quick answers
Before the methodology: what a notice period actually is.
- What a notice period is. The gap between telling your employer you are leaving and your last working day — set by your contract, by the law of the country you work in, or by a collective agreement, in that rough order of specificity. How notice periods work covers this in full.
- How it is calculated. Once you know the length and which day the count starts from, it is arithmetic — but the counting convention varies (calendar days, working days, a fixed date), which is exactly what the tool below handles rather than this page. The notice period calculator does the arithmetic.
- What happens if you leave without serving it. Depends on the jurisdiction and the contract: it can mean a deduction from final pay, a demand for a buyout figure, or in some places nothing enforceable at all. This index does not walk through that sequence — the guide linked below does. What happens if you quit without notice has the sequence.
What this is
One dataset, built only from sources that were actually read.
This project publishes exactly one kind of research: a record of what a named authority says, with the URL, the source type, and the date it was last fetched and checked against the claim. No number enters it from a secondary source — not a competitor, not an HR vendor’s blog, not a search result, not an AI answer. A country nobody has read the law for is labelled as such rather than filled in with a guess dressed up as a finding.
It is not a survey. Nothing here describes what employers actually do, how often notice is waived, or what a buyout costs in practice — that would need consenting participants and a data-collection design this site has deliberately not built. It is a record of statutory and government-guidance text, and only that.
4
Jurisdictions verified
2
Partially verified
2
Source review required
17
Government sources read
5
With state/provincial variation recorded
Why the answer differs by country
The same question gets three different kinds of answer.
Verifying eight jurisdictions the same way surfaces a pattern worth stating plainly: “what is the notice period” is not one question with a missing number, it is three different questions depending on where you are. Some countries set a statutory floor that scales with service, as Singapore and the UK do. Some fix the length in the civil code itself and forbid the employer binding an employee to a longer period than they themselves owe, as Germany’s § 622(6) BGB does. And some — France is the clearest case read so far — set no general length in the law at all, and route the answer to a collective agreement or local custom instead. A single global figure would misdescribe all three of those, which is the specific claim this index refuses to make.
The source hierarchy
Not every source is treated the same way.
A source’s tier decides whether a claim may be published from it at all, and how it is attributed. The register that enforces this is the same one every jurisdiction page cites from.
- Tier 1 Legislation
- The instrument itself — a section of a civil code or an act. Quotable directly, where the text is actually served rather than rendered client-side.
- Tier 2 Government agency guidance
- The authority’s own explanation of the law — GOV.UK, Acas, Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower, Service-Public.fr. Publishable, attributed to the agency in its own terms.
- Tier 3 Courts
- A judgment. Publishable with the case named. None used yet in this dataset.
- Tier 4 Named professional bodies
- Supporting only, never the sole support for a claim. None used yet in this dataset.
- — Commercial blogs, HR-SaaS content, aggregators, AI answers
- Not citable and not registrable. Usable, at most, as a lead to a Tier 1–2 document that must then be read directly — never as the source itself.
The verification process
How a jurisdiction moves through the record.
The same sequence, every cycle, per country. Skipping a step is how a competitor’s aggregator page ends up quoted as if it were the law.
- Identify the authority — the body that publishes the rule, not the body that ranks for it.
- Open the authority’s own pages from this project’s environment, and record what came back. A source is not verified because it exists in an earlier document or because a search result mentions it.
- Read the text that supports the exact claim to be published — not the page’s summary, not its title.
- Write the claim so it can be checked against that text, with any qualifier the source itself carries.
- Record the date the page was opened, and any “last updated” date the page states about itself. Both matter, and they are different facts.
- Log the request — including a failure to load, which is a recorded network fact rather than a silent gap.
- Set the status from what was actually read, and set the next review date.
Coverage today
Eight jurisdictions have a record. This is the honest state of all of them.
Generated from the same registry the country pages and the directory read — this table cannot describe a jurisdiction as verified when the underlying record says otherwise, because it is the underlying record.
| Jurisdiction | Status | Source tier(s) used | Sources cited | Last verified |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| United Kingdom | Verified guidance available | Tier 1, Tier 2 | 8 | August 20, 2026 |
| Singapore | Verified guidance available | Tier 2 | 2 | August 20, 2026 |
| Germany | Verified guidance available | Tier 1 | 3 | August 20, 2026 |
| France | Verified guidance available | Tier 2 | 1 | August 20, 2026 |
| United States | Partly verified | Tier 2 | 1 | August 20, 2026 |
| Canada | Partly verified | Tier 1, Tier 2 | 2 | August 20, 2026 |
| India | Source review required | — | 0 | Not verified |
| Australia | Source review required | — | 0 | Not verified |
Five of the eight records depend on more than the national law.
A country can have a national record and still not have a national answer. Where a state, province, region or department can change the result, this dataset says which unit it actually read rather than implying the rest of the country matches it.
- United Kingdom — region: Northern Ireland
- France — department: Moselle, Bas-Rhin, Haut-Rhin
- United States — state: California
- Canada — province: Ontario
- India — state: not yet recorded
Using this data
How to check the rule that applies to you.
- Open the source link on the relevant country page yourself, rather than relying on this page’s paraphrase of it — the paraphrase is written to be checkable against the original for exactly this reason.
- Compare the “last verified” date against the source’s own “last updated” date, where the source states one. A source checked months ago can still be the current text; one that has changed since is what a re-read is meant to catch, and the planned review date shows when one is due — it is not proof that one has happened.
- Check whether a collective or sector agreement covers your role before treating a statutory figure as the operative one — in several of the verified countries, it is not.
- Treat every claim here as a floor or a starting point, never as a final answer for your specific contract. None of it is legal advice, and it says so on every page it appears on.
Project your last working day and read about paying to leave early use the same jurisdiction-neutral arithmetic wherever you are. What happens if you quit without notice covers the sequence after you have decided.
Limitations
What this dataset does not, and cannot yet, support.
Stated once here, and repeated on every page the data feeds, because a methodology that only admits its limits in one place is one a reader can miss.
- Four verified countries. Any characterisation of this dataset as global, comprehensive, or an index of the world would be false. It is an index of what has been read.
- Statutory floors are not what most people owe. In every country reviewed, the operative number usually comes from the employment contract or a collective agreement — documents this project cannot read for a reader.
- Employee-side only. Employer notice obligations are a different set of rules and appear only where a record says so explicitly.
- Network reachability shapes coverage, not just evidence strength.
- No sub-national completeness. One recorded state or province is one recorded state or province, and nothing more.
- No practice data. Nothing here describes what employers actually do, how often notice is waived, or what buyouts cost.
- Not legal advice, in any row, on any page, for anyone.
Update cycle
A planned review date, shown openly.
Every record carries a planned re-read date six months after its sources were last checked. That is a plan, not a guarantee: nothing re-reads a source automatically, and a planned date is not evidence that a review took place. When a record is re-read, or a source is found to have moved or changed, the change is logged rather than silently corrected.
Machine-readable
Download the dataset.
Both files are generated from the same registry this page renders from — never a separately maintained copy — and carry the same status, source and verification date as the row above. Neither is legal advice, and that line travels with the file: the CSV opens with a comment naming the methodology page, and the JSON carries the same notice as a field.
A row with nothing cited (Australia, at the time of writing) ships with an empty source URL rather than a placeholder — nothing has been read yet, and the file says so instead of guessing.
Share
Share this dataset.
Plain links, no tracking pixel and no third-party widget script — sharing this page adds no request this site does not already make.
Embed
Embed the coverage table.
A static block with no script and no iframe — copy it into another page as-is. It carries its own minimal styling so it reads correctly with none of this site’s CSS present, and the attribution line linking back here is part of the snippet, not something to add separately.
Related
The methodology in full, and what has changed.
This page states the coverage and the process; two pages go further. One is the public rendering of the internal methodology document this project holds itself to — source hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion criteria, update frequency, and where the two can differ from what is described above. The other is the dataset’s actual revision history, which currently has exactly one entry because this is genuinely the first version.
Citation
How to cite this research.
If you are citing the dataset as a whole:
The Global Notice Period Index, QuitWithoutNotice.
quitwithoutnotice.com/global-notice-period-index
If you are citing one jurisdiction’s rule specifically, cite the government source that rule links to — the URL and the verification date are printed against every claim on that country’s page — rather than this index, which is the record of the sources, not itself a primary one.
Sources
Each source a legal claim or answer on this page rests on is listed here, with the date it was last checked.
- § 622 BGB — Kündigungsfristen bei Arbeitsverhältnissen
- § 623 BGB — Schriftform der Kündigung
- § 626 BGB — Fristlose Kündigung aus wichtigem Grund
- Canada Labour Code, section 230 — Employer’s duty (notice of termination)
- Employment Rights Act 1996, Part IX — Minimum period of notice
- Notice periods: Notice when resigning
- Paydays, pay periods, and the final wages
- Handing in your notice: Your employment contract
- Handing in your notice: Giving notice
- Handing in your notice: Payment during your notice period
- Handing in your notice: Garden leave
- Handing in your notice: Restrictive covenants
- Termination of employment — Your guide to the Employment Standards Act
- Termination of employment: Termination without notice
- Termination of employment: Termination with notice
- Giving or getting notice from your job
- Démission d’un salarié
About this research
Is the Global Notice Period Index a complete global database of notice periods?
No. It holds a record for eight jurisdictions and has verified four of them. The other roughly 241 countries and territories resolve to “not covered”, which is stated rather than filled in with an inferred or averaged figure.
Why are some countries marked “review required” instead of given a page?
A country is published only once its own authority’s pages have actually been read this cycle. Where that has not happened, the honest status is “review required”, not a page built from what looked likely to be correct.
How often is the index reviewed?
Each record carries a planned re-read date, six months after its sources were last checked, shown beside them. That date is a plan rather than proof that a review has happened, and nothing re-reads a source automatically. When a record is re-read, or a source link is found broken, the change is logged rather than silently corrected.
Can I use this data in my own article or research?
Yes — cite the index for the dataset as a whole, or cite the specific government source printed against the claim you are using. Neither requires permission; both are asked for by name so a reader can check the claim against the original.