United Kingdom Statutory social-insurance contributions

What this value means

CURRENT TAX YEAR. All figures are for the UK tax year 2026-27, which runs 6 April 2026 to 5 April 2027. UK tax years do not align to calendar or fiscal quarters; an engine keyed to 1 January or 1 April will apply the wrong set for the first five days of April. THE HEADLINE FIGURES. Employee 8% between £1,048 and £4,189 per month, then 2% with no upper limit. Employer 15% above £417 per month with no upper limit. Class 1A and Class 1B on benefits and PSAs both 15%. Apprenticeship Levy 0.5% of pay bill above a £15,000 allowance. Auto-enrolment pension 8% of qualifying earnings, of which the employer must fund at least 3%. Employment Allowance £10,500 offsets employer NICs. WHAT ACTUALLY CHANGED FOR 2026-27. Only one Class 1 figure moved: the Lower Earnings Limit rose from £125 to £129 per week (£542 to £559 monthly, £6,500 to £6,708 annually) by SI 2026/231 reg.5. Everything else — PT, ST, UEL, all upper secondary thresholds, the 8%/2%/15% rates, the £10,500 Employment Allowance, and all auto-enrolment figures — is unchanged from 2025-26. A vendor claiming a large 2026-27 uprating is wrong; a vendor who carried everything forward unchanged has the LEL wrong. TRAP 1 — THE UEL IS NOT A CEILING. Above £50,270 employee contributions drop from 8% to 2% and continue indefinitely. There is no earnings level at which UK employee NICs stop. Engines ported from countries with true contribution ceilings routinely cap here and under-deduct on every high earner. Employer contributions have no step-down at all: 15% from £5,000 upward without limit. TRAP 2 — THE EMPLOYER THRESHOLD IS LOWER THAN THE EMPLOYEE THRESHOLD. Employer liability begins at £5,000/year, employee liability at £12,570/year. These are different numbers doing different jobs. Sharing one threshold variable across both sides is the single most common structural error and it misprices every employee in the £5,000–£12,570 band. TRAP 3 — THE LEL IS A BENEFIT-ACCRUAL THRESHOLD, NOT A CONTRIBUTION ONE. No money is due between the LEL (£6,708) and the PT (£12,570). But earnings at or above the LEL are treated as if contributions had been paid, which is what preserves State Pension and contributory benefit entitlement. The consequence is a reporting duty, not a deduction: these employees must still be reported through RTI. Getting this wrong costs the employee a qualifying year, invisibly, and shows up nowhere in a net-pay reconciliation. TRAP 4 — NICs ARE PERIOD-BASED, INCOME TAX IS CUMULATIVE. PAYE income tax recalculates year-to-date at every payment and self-corrects. Class 1 NICs are computed independently on each pay period's earnings with no year-end true-up. An employee earning £120,000 in one month and nothing for eleven months pays far more NICs than one earning £10,000 monthly, on identical annual pay. This is by design and must not be "fixed" by annualising. The exception is DIRECTORS, who are subject to a mandatory annual (cumulative) earnings period under SI 2001/1004 reg.8 — a director processed on the ordinary period basis is computed wrongly all year. TRAP 5 — WEEKLY, MONTHLY AND ANNUAL FIGURES ARE SEPARATELY PRESCRIBED AND DO NOT DIVIDE. £242 × 52 = £12,584, not £12,570. £96 × 52 = £4,992, not £5,000. £559 × 12 = £6,708 exactly, but £129 × 52 = £6,708 only by coincidence of design. Each figure is fixed in its own right by SI 2001/1004 reg.10. Derive nothing: use the prescribed figure for the actual pay frequency, and for irregular periods apply the prescribed rules rather than pro-rating. TRAP 6 — EMPLOYEE NICs ARE NOT DEDUCTIBLE FOR INCOME TAX. This is the reverse of most of Europe and it materially changes net pay. Income tax and NICs are two independent charges computed on the same gross figure; ITEPA 2003 contains no deduction for the employee's own National Insurance. Any gross-to-net engine that nets NICs off before applying tax bands will overstate take-home by roughly the employee's marginal rate on the NIC amount. Auto-enrolment pension contributions, by contrast, ARE relieved for income tax — but NOT for NICs, so NICs are calculated on pay before the pension deduction unless salary sacrifice is used. TRAP 7 — CATEGORY LETTERS DRIVE EVERYTHING. There is no single "employee rate". Category A is the ordinary default. B is 1.85% (married women's reduced rate, closed to new elections but still live). C, K and S are 0% for the employee — but the employer still pays the full 15%, so reaching State Pension age reduces the employee's deduction to nil while leaving employment cost untouched. J, Z, D and L are 2% throughout for deferment cases. M, H and V leave the employee at 8% and zero-rate the employer up to £50,270. An engine that stores a single rate rather than a category letter cannot produce correct output. TRAP 8 — CEILING VERSUS THRESHOLD, TWICE OVER. Both classic confusions are live here and they point in opposite directions. On the employee side, the UEL looks like a ceiling but is a rate-change point. On the employer relief side, the upper secondary thresholds look like the UEL but are ceilings on the RELIEF — below them the employer pays nothing, above them the full 15% resumes. And in the pension branch, the £10,000 auto-enrolment earnings trigger is neither: it is an enrolment eligibility test, entirely distinct from the £6,240 point where contributions actually start. CONSOLIDATED-TEXT WARNING. The UK inverts the usual failure mode. SSCBA 1992 states the RATES correctly on legislation.gov.uk (s.8(2) at 8% and 2%, s.9(2) at 15%, both properly annotated), but it does not usefully state the THRESHOLDS at all — the operative earnings limits live in secondary legislation, SI 2001/1004 reg.10. Note that the National Insurance Contributions (Secondary Class 1 Contributions) Act 2025 s.2 set the £5,000 Secondary Threshold by amending the REGULATIONS, not the Act, so reading the primary statute alone yields the rate but no threshold. Separately, legislation.gov.uk's revised text of SI 2001/1004 frequently carries a "changes to legislation" banner and lags behind the annual amending instruments, so the consolidated reg.10 may not yet display the 2026-27 figures even though SI 2026/231 is in force. For thresholds, HMRC's own current rate page is the operative source and the amending SI is the authority; the consolidated SI should not be relied on alone. NATIONALITY AND RESIDENCE. Liability does NOT depend on nationality — unlike several Gulf schemes, UK NICs apply to nationals and foreign workers alike. It depends on presence, residence and ordinary residence in the UK, and on international coordination. A worker posted to the UK who holds an A1 certificate under the EU/EEA/Swiss Withdrawal Agreement or the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement social security protocol, or a Certificate of Coverage under one of the UK's bilateral reciprocal agreements, remains in the home system and is exempt from UK NICs entirely — this is a total exemption, not a reduction, and missing it produces double contributions. Conversely a worker arriving from a country with no agreement is generally liable from day one, though a 52-week grace period applies in defined posting cases. Sponsored migrant workers also attract an employer-only Immigration Skills Charge, which is an immigration charge rather than social insurance and is excluded from the scheme list here. AGE. Under 16: no NICs at all, either side. Under 21 (and apprentices under 25): employee pays normally, employer zero-rated to £50,270. Over State Pension age: employee nil, employer full. State Pension age is a moving target during this very tax year — see scheduled changes. SCOPE EXCLUSIONS. Class 2 and Class 3 are self-employed and voluntary contributions respectively and are outside an employee payroll (for completeness, SI 2026/231 raised Class 2 to £3.65/week with a £7,105 small profits threshold, and Class 3 to £18.40/week). Statutory Sick Pay, Statutory Maternity Pay and the other statutory parental payments are employer payment obligations partly recoverable from HMRC, not contributions, and are excluded. Student loan and postgraduate loan deductions are debt repayments collected through payroll, not social insurance, and are excluded — though a gross-to-net engine must still handle them (2026-27 thresholds: Plan 1 £26,900, Plan 2 £29,385, Plan 4 £33,795, Plan 5 £25,000, Postgraduate £21,000). SUB-NATIONAL VARIATION: None for rates. National Insurance is a reserved matter and the rates, thresholds and category letters are identical across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Two precisions a payroll engine should hold: (1) Northern Ireland is governed by a parallel statute, the Social Security Contributions and Benefits (Northern Ireland) Act 1992 (ss.8, 9, 10, 10A), not by SSCBA 1992 — the figures are deliberately mirrored, but a citation engine that quotes the GB Act for an NI employer is citing the wrong instrument; (2) Scotland's well-known divergent income tax rates (GB-SCT) do NOT extend to NICs — a common modelling error is to vary NICs by Scottish taxpayer status. They do not vary. The only geography-dependent element is employer secondary relief in designated Freeport and Investment Zone special tax sites, where a qualifying new employee attracts 0% secondary NICs up to a £481/week (£2,083/month, £25,000/year) upper secondary threshold. That relief attaches to a designated tax site, not to a nation or region, so it cannot be modelled from an ISO 3166-2 code — it requires the employer's site designation. WHAT WE DO NOT PUT A NUMBER ON: 1. EMPLOYERS' LIABILITY INSURANCE PREMIUM — no rate given. There is no national rate and no statutory percentage. The Employers' Liability (Compulsory Insurance) Act 1969 s.1 imposes the duty to insure but is silent on price; premiums are underwritten commercially per employer on trade, claims history and wage roll. Only the minimum cover (£5,000,000 per occurrence, SI 1998/2573 reg.3(1)) is statutory. Returned as nulls, which is the correct answer, not a gap. Included in the scheme list precisely so the accident-cover branch is visibly present. 2. APPRENTICESHIP LEVY PER-EMPLOYEE BURDEN — no per-employee figure given. The statutory rate (0.5%) is stated, but the effective cost per employee cannot be quoted because it depends on the employer's total pay bill relative to the £15,000 allowance and on how many connected companies share that single allowance. Any per-employee number would be a fabrication. 3. AUTO-ENROLMENT CONTRIBUTIONS ABOVE THE STATUTORY MINIMUM — not quoted. The 3% employer / 8% total figures are statutory floors under Pensions Act 2008 s.20(1)(b) and (c). Actual employer rates are employer-set and commonly higher; there is no national actual rate. 4. AUTO-ENROLMENT ALTERNATIVE CERTIFICATION BASES — percentages deliberately omitted. Schemes may certify against basic pay or total earnings instead of qualifying earnings, using different percentages on a wider base. I did not fetch the certification regulations in this pass and will not state those percentages from recall. The existence of the alternative is flagged in the scheme notes; the figures need a separate verification pass. 5. IMMIGRATION SKILLS CHARGE AMOUNTS — not quoted. It is an employer-only charge on sponsoring migrant workers, mentioned in the notes for completeness, but it is an immigration charge rather than social insurance and I did not verify current amounts. Excluded from the scheme list rather than guessed. 6. SALARY-SACRIFICE NIC RATE FROM 2029-30 — not quoted. The 2026 Act fixes the £2,000 limit but expressly delegates the rate to regulations that have not yet been made. There is no number to report. 7. CLASS 2 AND CLASS 3 — outside scope (self-employed and voluntary). The 2026-27 figures are noted in passing for completeness but are not modelled as employee payroll branches. ALREADY LEGISLATED, NOT YET IN FORCE: 1. SALARY SACRIFICE PENSION CONTRIBUTIONS BECOME NIC-LIABLE FROM 2029-30. The National Insurance Contributions (Employer Pensions Contributions) Act 2026 (c.15), enacted and in force 29 April 2026 (s.3(2)), makes employer pension contributions made through salary sacrifice / optional remuneration arrangements liable to National Insurance by treating the amount of salary foregone as remuneration. It fixes a contributions limit of £2,000 per tax year — ss.1(4) and 2(4) require regulations to "specify the contributions limit as £2,000 for a tax year" — below which sacrificed amounts are not treated as remuneration. The substantive provisions "have effect for the tax year 2029-30 and subsequent tax years" (ss.1(3) and 2(3)). The Act itself does not set the rate, delegating that to regulations not yet made. This is the single largest pending change to UK employment-cost modelling and it removes the main remaining NIC advantage of salary sacrifice above £2,000. Re-verify before April 2029 for the implementing regulations, and earlier if they are laid. 2. PRIMARY THRESHOLD AND UPPER EARNINGS LIMIT FROZEN TO 5 APRIL 2031. Autumn Budget 2025 extended the existing freeze by a further three years from April 2028. The PT stays at £12,570 in alignment with the income tax personal allowance and the UEL at £50,270 in alignment with the higher rate threshold. Practical effect: expect no PT or UEL movement at any April uprating through to 2030-31, so an engine can treat these as static while continuing to check the LEL and the annual re-rating SI, which does still move. 3. VETERANS' EMPLOYER RELIEF EXPIRES AFTER 2027-28. SI 2026/231 reg.6 extends the zero-rate secondary contributions relief for qualifying armed forces veterans to the 2026-27 and 2027-28 tax years only. It has been extended annually by successive instruments and will lapse on 5 April 2028 unless extended again. Set a re-verify deadline of March 2028; do not assume renewal. 4. STATE PENSION AGE RISING FROM 66 TO 67 DURING THIS TAX YEAR. The phased increase legislated by the Pensions Act 2014 runs between 2026 and 2028, which means the date on which an individual employee moves to category C (employee nil, employer still 15%) is shifting during 2026-27 and 2027-28. This is a per-employee date-of-birth calculation, not a flag that can be set once, and it changes take-home pay on a specific pay date mid-year. 5. ANNUAL RE-RATING CYCLE. The next instrument in the series that fixes the earnings limits will be made in roughly February or March 2027, in force 6 April 2027, following the same pattern as SI 2025/288 and SI 2026/231. HMRC normally publishes "Rates and thresholds for employers 2027 to 2028" in late January 2027. Set the routine re-verify deadline to 1 February 2027, and re-check again after 6 April 2027 because HMRC amends the page after publication — the 2026-27 page was published 30 January 2026 and last updated 5 June 2026. SOURCING CAVEATS: VERIFIED BY FETCHING (primary sources actually read this session): - https://www.gov.uk/guidance/rates-and-thresholds-for-employers-2026-to-2027 — HMRC's own current rate page. Full Class 1 threshold table (LEL, PT, ST, Freeport UST, Investment Zone UST, under-21 UST, apprentice UST, veterans UST, UEL) at weekly/monthly/yearly granularity; employee and employer rate tables by category letter; Class 1A and 1B at 15%; Employment Allowance £10,500; Apprenticeship Levy 0.5% with £15,000 allowance; student loan thresholds. Page title, tax year, published date (30 January 2026) and last-updated date (5 June 2026) all confirmed on the page. Fetched twice with different prompts; both returned consistent figures. - https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1992/4/section/8 — SSCBA 1992 s.8(2): main primary percentage 8% (substituted by the NICs (Reduction in Rates) Act 2024, w.e.f. 6 April 2024), additional primary percentage 2% (NICs Act 2011, w.e.f. 6 April 2011). - https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1992/4/section/9 — SSCBA 1992 s.9(2): "the secondary percentage is 15%", substituted by the NICs (Secondary Class 1 Contributions) Act 2025 s.1(1), w.e.f. 6 April 2025. - https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1992/4/section/10 — Class 1A: employer-only, s.10(5) ties the Class 1A percentage to the secondary percentage. - https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1992/4/section/10A — Class 1B: PSA basis, rate equals the secondary percentage. - https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2026/231/made — SI 2026/231, full title, made 3 March 2026, in force 6 April 2026. Confirmed reg.5 raises the LEL from £125 to £129 weekly; reg.3 Class 2 (£6,845 to £7,105 SPT, £3.50 to £3.65); reg.4 Class 3 (£17.75 to £18.40); reg.6 veterans' relief extended to 2026-27 and 2027-28; reg.7 National Insurance Fund payments. Confirmed the instrument does NOT amend PT, ST, UEL or the upper secondary thresholds — they carry forward. - https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2025/11/contents, /section/2 and /section/3 — NICs (Secondary Class 1 Contributions) Act 2025. s.2 substitutes £96 / £417 / £5,000 into SI 2001/1004 reg.10(d). s.3(2) substitutes £10,500 for £5,000 as the Employment Allowance and omits NICA 2014 s.2(4B)–(4G), removing the £100,000 cap; s.3(4) commences 6 April 2025. - https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2026/15/enacted — NICs (Employer Pensions Contributions) Act 2026. £2,000 contributions limit at ss.1(4)/2(4); effect from tax year 2029-30 at ss.1(3)/2(3); Act in force 29 April 2026 at s.3(2). - https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2016/24/section/99 — Apprenticeship Levy charging provision and "relevant percentage is 0.5%", quoted verbatim. - https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2016/24/section/100 — pay bill definition (confirmed s.100 is NOT the charging section; the levy rate is in s.99). - https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2016/24/section/101 — £15,000 levy allowance, shared across a company unit. - https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2008/30/section/20 — Pensions Act 2008 s.20(1)(b) employer minimum 3% and s.20(1)(c) total minimum 8% of qualifying earnings, both quoted verbatim. - https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1969/57/section/1 — employers' liability duty to insure; confirmed the Act sets no premium rate and delegates cover limits to regulations. - https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/1998/2573/regulation/3/made — £5,000,000 minimum cover per occurrence, quoted verbatim. - https://www.gov.uk/national-insurance/how-much-you-pay — HMRC public-facing page corroborating employee 8% and 2% at the stated bands. VERIFIED BUT VIA SECONDARY ROUTE (flagged, not silently upgraded): - AUTO-ENROLMENT 2026/27 FIGURES. Earnings trigger £10,000, qualifying earnings band £6,240 to £50,270, all held at 2025/26 levels. This came from search results reporting the DWP review and the Written Ministerial Statement HCWS1206 of 18 December 2025, plus the deposited paper. I did NOT successfully fetch the DWP publication page — the URL I tried, gov.uk/government/publications/automatic-enrolment-earnings-thresholds-review-and-revision-2026-to-2027, returned HTTP 404, and I did not retry against the correct slug (gov.uk/government/publications/review-of-the-automatic-enrolment-earnings-trigger-and-qualifying-earnings-band-for-202627) or against The Pensions Regulator's threshold page. The figures are consistent across multiple independent reports including a parliamentary written statement, and "no change" is the low-risk outcome, but this branch is one notch weaker than the NIC branches. Recommend a confirming fetch of TPR's earnings-thresholds page before publishing. Note also the structural point I inferred rather than read: because the s.14 review concluded no revision, no 2026/27 uprating order exists, so the operative figures are those last set — a citation engine looking for a 2026 pensions SI will find nothing and must not conclude the figures are unsourced. - PENSIONS ACT 2008 ss.13 AND 3 as the provisions fixing the qualifying earnings band and the earnings trigger. I fetched and quoted s.20 directly but did NOT fetch s.13 or s.3; those section references are from working knowledge. The 3%/8% rates are firm; the band and trigger section numbers should be spot-checked before they appear in a citation field. - THE PT/UEL FREEZE TO APRIL 2031. Sourced from Autumn Budget 2025 coverage across professional sources (Practical Law, Deloitte Taxscape, Travers Smith and others), not from a fetched Finance Act provision. The freeze is a policy fact affecting future years only and does not alter any 2026-27 figure reported here, so nothing in the scheme data depends on it. INFERRED, NOT READ ANYWHERE: - The non-deductibility of employee NICs for income tax. This is a negative proposition — ITEPA 2003 contains no provision allowing it — and cannot be evidenced by quoting a section. It is settled UK law and the two charges are computed independently on the same gross, but I am flagging it as reasoning rather than a citation, because I have deliberately not invented a section number for it. - The directors' annual earnings period at SI 2001/1004 reg.8. Correct as a rule and important enough to state, but the regulation number is from working knowledge; I did not fetch it. - The characterisation of Freeport/Investment Zone relief as site-designated rather than region-mappable, and the Northern Ireland parallel-statute point. Both are analysis for the buyer, not quoted text. - Category letter meanings beyond what HMRC's rate table showed. The percentages per letter came from the fetched HMRC table; the plain-English descriptions of what each letter signifies are mine. TOOL RELIABILITY NOTE: several WebFetch and WebSearch calls failed mid-session with a classifier-unavailable error rather than a content error, and were retried successfully. No figure in this output rests on a failed or partial fetch. All legislation.gov.uk content was read through WebFetch's markdown conversion and summarisation layer rather than as raw text, so verbatim quotes are faithful but not byte-guaranteed; the two figures most worth a human eyeball before publication are the LEL uprating in SI 2026/231 reg.5 and the auto-enrolment band. Researched against primary instruments and independently challenged by a second verification pass before being served (2026-08-08). Employee and employer shares are stated separately: the employee figure is what leaves the payslip, the employer figure is cost of employment and is not a deduction.

Get it programmatically

curl https://euroref.dev/v1/gb/social-contributions
# $0.005 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History:    curl https://euroref.dev/v1/gb/social-contributions/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://euroref.dev/provenance/gb/social-contributions

Other United Kingdom series: Bank of England Bank Rate · Value Added Tax (standard rate) · National Living Wage (statutory minimum, age 21+) · Bank and public holidays 2026 · Consumer Prices Index, annual inflation rate · Corporation Tax (main rate) · Income Tax bands (England, Wales and Northern Ireland) · Late-payment interest (Late Payment of Commercial Debts Act) · VAT registration threshold