Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme – A little bit of detail

We’re being asked the same questions by several of our clients regarding the amounts of pay they can claim using the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme.

Here’s a little detail for you:

Full time and part time employees
For full time and part time salaried employees, the employee’s actual salary before tax, as of 28 February should be used to calculate the 80%. Fees, commission and bonuses should not be included.

Employees whose pay varies
If the employee has been employed (or engaged by an employment business) for a full twelve months prior to the claim, you can claim for the higher of either:

the same month’s earning from the previous year
average monthly earnings from the 2019-20 tax year
If the employee has been employed for less than a year, you can claim for an average of their monthly earnings since they started work.

If the employee only started in February 2020, use a pro-rata for their earnings so far to claim.

Once you’ve worked out how much of an employee’s salary you can claim for, you must then work out the amount of Employer National Insurance Contributions and minimum automatic enrolment employer pension contributions you are entitled to claim.

This information has been taken from the government guidance which you can read more about here:

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/claim-for-wage-costs-through-the-coronavirus-job-retention-scheme

As always, we’re still here and we’ll do our best to help you through this difficult time.