Coronavirus Legislation

You will find all coronavirus legislation for the UK on legislation.gov.uk. We publish all coronavirus legislation as soon as possible and keep it up to date. We have highlighted some key pieces of coronavirus legislation on this page.

How to find out what the coronavirus rules are

If you want to find out what your legal obligations are, you are in the right place – legislation.gov.uk contains the law that you must follow. If you are looking for guidance on how best to stay safe and help control the spread of coronavirus, you need to visit GOV.UK, and, where relevant, the government websites for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Reading both the legislation AND the government guidance will help you to understand issues including:

• where and when you can meet with others;
• the local restrictions that apply in your area;
• when you need to self-isolate after international travel; and
• how to get financial support.

What is the difference between legislation and guidance?

To find out exactly what the rules are during the coronavirus pandemic, you need to look at both legislation and government guidance. Legislation sets out legal obligations and restrictions that are enforceable by law. If you do not abide by the legislation you are breaking the law. Guidance and advice is likely to be based on legislation (in which case it will be legally binding) and it might offer the best or most appropriate way to adhere to the law.

The law is what you must do; the guidance might be a mixture of what you must do and what you should do.

Key pieces of coronavirus legislation

Legislation differs depending on which part of the UK you are in. Coronavirus legislation has been drafted according to how it applies in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland and that is how we have organised it on this page. Most coronavirus legislation is secondary legislation, which has been made under powers set out in primary legislation.

Searching for coronavirus legislation

We have listed the key pieces of coronavirus legislation, but this list is not exhaustive. You can use search to find all secondary legislation with 'coronavirus' in the title. To make this list easier to read, these search results do not include any legislation originating from the EU.

You can also search for legislation originating from the EU with 'coronavirus' in the title.

Alternatively, you might want to see the results for all secondary legislation with ‘health protection’ in the title.

Doing your own search for coronavirus legislation

To refine your search, you can use four search parameters - title, year, number and legislation type. You can use these parameters (fig. 1) wherever you are on legislation.gov.uk. The more specific your search, the fewer results will be returned, making it easier to find the most appropriate results.

Fig. 1 – legislation.gov.uk search

Refine your results further using advanced search

The advanced search allows you to refine your search queries further, with additional search parameters including language and keywords in content.

Changes to coronavirus legislation

A lot of the legislation relating to coronavirus is being amended by subsequent legislation, sometimes frequently. For example, The Health Protection (Coronavirus, International Travel) (England) Regulations 2020 (S.I. 2020/568) has been changed a number of times to amend the list of exempt countries.

When a new item of legislation is published, we capture all of the changes it makes to existing legislation, and we publish these outstanding changes on our Changes to Legislation page. We then apply those changes to the text of the existing coronavirus legislation, usually within a few days of any changes coming into force. If changes have yet to be applied to the text, we flag that in a red box at the top of the legislation. If you click on this red box, you will find the outstanding changes.

Understanding coronavirus legislation

Some of the changes made to legislation are temporary, or may have limited application. We have tried to make this as clear as possible, but to fully understand the legislation you will need to read the annotations to that legislation.

The annotations are added by our editorial team when amending the legislation and provide additional information and context for the change. They give the authority for the change, and include details of the amending legislation, including when the amendment came into force.

Annotations appear at the foot of a provision, or under the associated heading if relating to a higher-level division (fig. 2).

Fig. 2 – annotations on a piece of legislation

Read associated documents

You might also find it useful to read the Explanatory Notes, Policy Notes, or Explanatory Memoranda to the legislation as they have been specifically written to clearly explain what the legislation is aiming to do. You will find these in the ‘More Resources’ tab (fig. 3).

Fig. 3 – an example of the tabs that appear on a piece of legislation

Revoked legislation

Sometimes coronavirus legislation is revoked, repealed or expires. Revoked legislation will come up in your search results, but will say ‘revoked’ in the title. Revoked means that the legislation no longer has legal force, unless there are any savings made. If there are savings (parts of the legislation that continue to have legal force for certain purposes), these will be captured in the annotations.

Other legal notices

Legislation.gov.uk is where you will find all coronavirus legislation. But sometimes authorities will use a different mechanism to make temporary changes to the law that are related to coronavirus, or to trigger the commencement or suspension of legal changes. This may be done through a direction, designation or notice. Notifications of this type, that have legal effect, are published in The Gazette.