From 6 April 2025, the rate of employer national insurance contributions (NICs) will rise by 1.2 percentage points to 15%.
Additionally, the threshold at which employers start to pay NICs will decrease from £9,100 to £5,000 per year. To support small businesses amid these changes, the government will increase the Employment Allowance from £5,000 to £10,500 and remove the previous £100,000 threshold, making it available to all eligible employers.
With the increase and lowering of the threshold employers will find that they will pay a considerable amount more, but there are ways in which you could reduce the additional costs:
Employing military veterans
In April 2021 the government introduced NI Holiday for employing military veterans.
From 6 April 2021 to 5 April 2022, you’ll need to pay the secondary Class 1 National Insurance contributions as normal and then claim it back from 6 April 2022 onwards.
To claim the relief, you’ll need to confirm that the veteran qualifies.
Employees that qualify
An employee qualifies as a veteran if they have either:
- served at least on day in the regular armed forces
- completed at least one day of basic training
The relief is available to a veteran who has started their first civilian job regardless of when they left the regular armed forces.
For more information please get in touch with us.
Employing apprentices
From 6 April 2016, employers may not need to pay National Insurance Contributions for an apprentice, if they are:
- Under 25 years old
- are on an approved UK government apprenticeship standard or framework
- Earns less than £967 a week
Click here for more information
Employing staff under the age of 21
From April 2015 employers no longer have to pay National Insurance for employees under the age of 21, as long as they don’t earn above the £4,189 per month (2024-2025).
Salary Sacrifice
A salary sacrifice arrangement is an agreement to reduce an employees entitle to cash pay in return for a non-cash benefit.
As an employer, you can set up a salary sacrifice arrangement by changing the terms of your employees contract and the employee needs to agree to this.
A salary sacrifice must not reduce an employees cash earnings below the national minimum wage.
When applying a salary sacrifice to the payroll it will subsequently reduce their pay and will save you on the employer national insurance, however not all schemes are exempt from benefits in kind. The only exemptions on non-cash benefits are:
- payments into a pension scheme – you could consider altering you current pension scheme to a salary sacrifice scheme
- employer providing pensions advice
- workplace nurseries
- childcare vouchers and directly contracted employer provided childcare that starter on or before 4 October 2018
- bicycles and cycling safety equipment
For more information please get in touch or click here.