6.15am on payday and I’ve not been paid.

[TheLightSideOfTheMoon]

Usually it’s there when I wake up.

Got a lot going on and I’m really stressed out about this.

Bills go out today and I need my pay to be in my account.

I don’t need this anxiety.

It's not late if contracts state (as most do) that payment must reach your account by close of business on a particular day.

People shouldn't have direct debits set up for the day the money hits their bank.

Move your direct debits. Give yourself some leeway.

If it's a massive company it's likely it will be by BACS so it should be there early in the morning. Payments from small companies that manually send faster payments could arrive at any time.

But in any case, it should tell you in your contract when you should be paid by and if it doesn't arrive on time, you or your manager should be on to payroll to send the money today.

But it's not a good idea to have payments going out on payday in case of problems like this, better to have a couple of days leeway, so that's also something to look at. Or arrange a small overdraft, but pretend that it doesn't exist apart from to allow payments not to bounce.

Hopefully you might have been paid by now anyway OP, or at least you work can tell you what's going on?

neither have I small business can't pay for after school club or book a needed Uber for my DD

I worked for a large international company when this happened to me and 5 other colleagues, due to be paid the friday before a bank holiday weekend.
It was a payroll fuck up and they said that our pay would go in the following Wednesday.

I said no way, its your fuck up, our contracts state payment on the 27th of each month so pay by CHAPS or I'm going to my union. Payments made within 30 mins.
Dont take any shit op, this is YOUR money that you have earned.

I didn't say that I approved.

I asked how you're supposed to tell if an employer pays on time or not before you're employed by them. And as you admit, you can't - you have to leave, and take the gamble again.

Same with banks - they can't GUARANTEE availability of your money.

Which is why the answer is not relying on your employer to pay you exactly on time is the answer, or your bank to give you access to it. You need to be smart about your financial management. Have credit available, have savings available, and understand your own liabilities.

I work in a surgery and still haven't been paid. It's like this every single month. It's an absolute shit show! And everyone is asking the manager and all she says is she messaged the GP who owns the surgery.

I totally get the anxiety - I worked at a nursery that did this. Not frequently but enough that it became an issue. Now even though my current work has never ever had any issue with pay being late or wrong I still sometimes feel stressed near payday. Like many others I reply on my wages - and since I always manage to be at work when I’m supposed to I very much expect my work to pay me when they’re supposed to. I’m sorry, I hope it’s not too stressful. I do often find ringing a company to be helpful, they’ll often allow you to pay slightly later.

It's stressful and upsetting, yeah, but it's a situation they've contributed to by having DD ready to go out immediately.

Ours are staggered between days 1-15 of the month.

No, it's not good, but employers don't have absolute control, and can be as susceptible to bank/human error as anyone else.

You might think I'm making excuses - I'm not. I insisted on really robust pay set ups for my staff. But there's only so much you can prevent, and you're really naive if you think it's possible to prevent all possible failures.

Absolute rubbish and actually quite disgusting to treat staff like that .
some people are counting down the hours for pay day .

I’m astounded that people think these things happen , your employer is lying to you when it’s late of course these things don’t happen at all . They have set payment late or not at all for whatever reason it is not the normal .

In my current job, we set up the BACS 3 working days before pay day and I've never known the payment to not be available from after midnight on the pay day.

The weekly staff are set up Tues for Thursday and they would absolutely complain if it wasn't in when they woke up, so I'd know if it had ever happened.

Interesting that it might vary by the receiving bank though, something to check if it ever does occur.

There have been more than one occasion where our online banking has been down for half or a whole day. Now as we always process payments a day early it has never meant payments were late. But it has meant that payments didn't hit accounts until around noon on the specified day.

We have no control over what happens once the money leaves the company account to when it reaches the employees account.

This happened once where I worked and we had to collect checques and go to bank and wait three days to clear! Fair to say the company had a lot of overdraft fees to pay off for the employers! It was definitely not a ‘mistake’. Company were basically taking the piss .

It's not just the bank, it's which banks the staff are using.

My company uses a crappy tiny bank that isn't signed up to most of the protocols that apply to big banks. I can see that all the pay set up for today is showing as deducted from our account. But it's not in my bank account yet.

I've outlined all the risks of this set up to the board, but no changes are being planned. And the treasurer flat ignores the rules I set to manage the system.

I'll say it again - you would be mad to place all your faith in banks and systems. There's only so much that they can control.

But they do.

I prepare my wages 3 days in advance & send payslips out.

I then pay the wages & set the date they're due.

I have no control over the time the funds will hit the accounts.

Of course it happens. It's incredibly naive to say that it doesn't.

Systems fail.
Staff make mistakes.
Banking systems go down.
Different banks do things differently - so someone with NatWest might get paid at midnight but someone with HSBC might get paid at 2pm.

For that reason, you should never have your DD's and bills set to come out on payday. ALWAYS leave a few days "grace" just in case something goes wrong.

Absolute rubbish and actually quite disgusting to treat staff like that . some people are counting down the hours for pay day

It's not disgusting 🙄 it's fact.

If payday is the 28th, that doesn't mean at one minute past midnight - it means at anytime on the 28th. Could be 1am, could be 7am, could be 11pm.

It just has to be there before the 29th. It could go in at 11.59pm if they wanted it to.

This is why it's really, REALLY important to train your kids up in good financial management.

Even from my first, tiny paycheck, I was drilled in putting aside some and making sure my DDs were coming out with a delay. Knowing how and when to use credit cards to best effect. Savings.

Because if you do this stuff from day one, you build a habit that will last a lifetime. And all that energy some people are using to worry about their bills - you're using that to learn a new skill, perform well at work, win that payrise. And best of all, good financial management is a valuable skill to your employer!

However little I've been paid, I've never once worried about my bills going out, because I've been set up from day one to have the flex to sort situations out.