How much to pay a 17 year old for summer admin work?

[lollypoppy123]

I am a self-employed accountant and have a family friend who wants to study accountancy. I was going to offer him about 15 hours a week over the summer hols to help with admin tasks and so he gets work experience. What is a fair rate of pay for this work?

Whatever you would pay anyone else.

Not less than minimum wage.

Are they actually going to be useful, or will it take you more time to explain what they have to do than you get work done? I don't know if you have to pay minimum wage if it is genuinely 'work experience' but you are an accountant! I would start at minimum wage and if they are actually useful, give them a rise of a pound or two as encouragement and as appreciation.

Minimum wage is only £7 something for 17 year olds. It feels low. I’d be tempted to start at £10 if you haven’t had a trial day with him. He might be rubbish or he might be good and I’d want to pay accordingly. £10 is minimum wage for 18-20 year olds so low but not unreasonable. Then, once you are happy that he can be useful, I might bump it up to £13.33 then you will be paying him a nice round £200 a week.

You could also just match whatever your local supermarket pays.

I used to do this for a family member when I was a teenager. I got paid significantly more than the minimum wage at the time for 17 year olds, and family member explained that it was still much cheaper to have me do basic bookkeeping tasks than it was for him to do it himself (as he could bill clients about 4x as much for his time as what he was paying me). As PP says, if it's going to take lots of training and handholding, that's your time that won't be spent productively, but if the student is bright and can grasp the concepts quickly, a lot of the kind of things he'll be doing are not very difficult so it might not take a lot of training.

I think he will be bright and helpful and was also thinking £10 ph so this feedback is helpful - just wanted to make sure I'm not under or over-paying against market rates.

https://www.gov.uk/national-minimum-wage-rates#:~:text=Current%20rates&text=£12.21%20(aged%2021%20and,£7.55%20(aged%20under%2018)

£7.55 is the minimum wage for a 17yo