My employer has not paid me 80% furlough payment or 2500

[gibbymaster]

I was fuloughed 6th April, and I get a salary of 3700 per month. My company have divided that into 4 and paid me one week @ 930, and then they have taken the 2500 divided this by 4 and paid me 3 weeks which is 1854.

This is well below 80% or 2500 cap What can I do about this, they seem not to want to talk to me about this.

What

I don’t understand your figures - they are not well below £2500 a month

??? Your figures don't seem odd

And your employer won't have received any money yet... Many are waiting until they do.

They paid you fully for week 1.

Then took the most you would get at 89% or the cap, divided it by the whole month and paid you for weeks 2,3 and 4...

Or have I missed something? I don't have a calculator to hand, but it seems reasonable

These seem reasonable figures to me.

You wouldn’t get the the full £2500 for the month because you weren’t furloughed for the entire month.

What they've done seems entirely right - if the whole thing was at furlough rates, you'd end up up £2,500 for the month (as 80% of your salary is more than £2,500) but you've ended up with more than that because they've paid you normally for one week of the month.

So full pay for the first week & then furlough pay for the following 3 weeks?

That sounds right.

I also think they've acted correctly. They have paid you 1 week full pay and 3 weeks capped pay. What do you think they should have done?

Were you expecting the full £2500 for your 3 weeks furloughed pay? That doesn't work. Companies have the option to top up, but they don't have to. If they don't top up, they will pay you what they will get from the Government, which will be £2500 per full month of work.

So you earn enough to be getting a fairly decent wage yet can’t work out that you have been paid £2784 this month which is above £2500???!!!

I mean if this is for April that - if anything - is on the generous side as assuming furlough kicked in on 6 April your only working days in April were 1-3 April. So prorating to give you a week at full pay is better than it might have been. Were you expecting £2.5k plus a week’s salary? As I don’t think that is how the furlough scheme works, I think it needs to be prorated for the period you are on furlough. So here, they have done it for 3/4 of the month. Sorry you are under stress and hope you are able to work out how they’ve calculated it - I do think it looks like they have done it correctly though.

Are you an employee of MN? Why is this in site stuff?

Ooh! Good question!

Hi there, @gibbymaster - we've now moved this over to our Employment Issues topic.

Thanks.

3700 x 80% = 2960 for a month
But as you say the maximum is 2500 for the month so they cant do that
So they paid you the maximum 3700 / 4 for 1 week = 925
And the maximum 2500 / 4 for 3 weeks = 625 a week

As others have said, you seem to have misunderstood. Your employers have actually overpaid you. They've worked on the basis of 4 weeks per month whereas it is actually 4.333 weeks.

If your salary is £3700 per month you are paid £853.84 per week. So they've overpaid you for the first week.

The government scheme is capped at £2500 per month. That works out at £576.92 per week. For 3 weeks you would get £1730.76. So they've overpaid you for those weeks as well.

Isn’t the £2500 gross? So you should also be paying tax & NI on the £2500, which will be around £2k take home (not sure about pension deductions), so more like £500 pw, £1500 for three weeks.

I'd have calculated it as your usual pay divided by the number of working days in the month (assuming mon-fri that's 22) then multiplied that by the days you actually worked:

3700/22=168.18x3=504.54

Then for the furlough the maximum amount divided by the number of working days in the month then multiply the daily rate by the remaining work days (19):

2500/22=113.64x19=2159.16

Then add those figures together giving a gross wage of £2663.70

So you've actually been paid more due to the way they've divided the month into 4 weeks rather than the longer calculation to account for the number of working days.

There is now guidance on how to calculate it

www.gov.uk/guidance/work-out-80-of-your-employees-wages-to-claim-through-the-coronavirus-job-retention-scheme

You get nearly £4k a month but you can't work it out? Really?

Isn’t the £2500 gross? So you should also be paying tax & NI on the £2500, which will be around £2k take home (not sure about pension deductions), so more like £500 pw, £1500 for three weeks

This is what I thought.

Rather stupidly the hmrc system requires apportionment by calendar days rather than working days. Other than that seems the right approach