London allowance

[mindutopia]

I’ve been at my current job for a little over a year. In that time I’ve always been paid a London allowance. Job is in central London but I live outside of London and commute it.

I just noticed that my pay is lower than expected this month. I just went in the check and I’ve been paid my base pay but allowance has been removed. It’s been a weird couple months because they messed up my pay and then they had to back pay it so I haven’t seen my actual true salary come through in a couple months.

Is the allowance based on where I live or where I work? I don’t want to ask HR because if they’ve been overpaying me for a year, I don’t want to point it out! (I did question whether I was eligible when I signed my contract and HR person said yes, but don’t exactly trust that!)

It will be based on where you work. It is up to you where you live, within reason of course.

If your job is in London, an allowance is common, especially if public sector and if it is in your contract, then it is indisputable that you are entitled to it, because to do the job, you either have the choice of expensive central housing, or commuting in from further afield, which also obviously costs a lot.

Is your job one with set pay scales, or is it more individual? If set pay scales, it will often say - salary of £X for a certain grade, plus allowance for inner and outer London and often other high cost areas and I would have thought that, for the public sector at least, there is a map or list of localities that fall into each category.

I am paid by pay scale. The options are base pay or with London allowance. I’ve always been paid allowance until now. Neither I nor my job have moved, so nothing has changed (except that we got a new online HR system this month).

I just don’t know whether to query it because if it’s based on where I live, I’ve probably been being paid in error all this time (even though HR has clearly always known where I lived). But if it’s based on where I work, then I should be getting it and it needs to be corrected.

In my workplace it is based on where you work but that doesn’t mean it is the same in yours.

Thanks, I was told it was based on where I worked when I started (I doubt that’s changed). I suspect maybe if they are disorganised enough to pay me the wrong salary a couple months ago (which has now been corrected), they’ve probably screwed this up to.