Paying casual workers – submit an RTI report every time?

Are you paying casual workers this summer? Perhaps you are paying piece-rates for the amount of produce picked or packed by each person. Reporting such small and variable payments under the new RTI system is a significant hassle.

The RTI rules require you to report each payment to workers, including paying casual workers, on or before the date of the payment. Fortunately you may be able to use one of these two concessions to ease your RTI reporting burden:

a) Where you are  paying casual workers daily or more than once a week, but the amounts paid are less than £109 per person per week, you can send RTI reports to HMRC weekly; or

b) Where the total number of your employees, including casual workers, is less than 50, you can send your RTI reports to HMRC on a monthly basis.

Concession b) will only apply for payments to employees made before 6 April 2014.

Your casual workers are likely to have no set working hours for each week. In effect they will be on a zero hours contract; paid for the hours they work, but otherwise not at all. In such cases you should choose option D of hours worked on the FPS report under RTI.

The Government wants employers to report data on the hours worked by employees in order to prevent fraud in the Tax Credits system. Under Universal Credit the hours worked will not be relevant to the employee’s claim, so in time when all claimants are moved from Tax Credits to Universal Credit, the requirement to report hours worked should be dropped.

We can do your payroll for you so you can let us worry about when to submit RTI reports when paying casual workers. Get an instant quote for our payroll services using the button below.

Newsletter issue – August 2013. Sign up now for your copy and receive free tax saving reports.