pensionableEarnings

Pensionable earnings is the part of an employee’s income used to calculate pension contributions.

The income included will depend on what earningsBasis is used to calculate the employerContributionAmount and employeeContributionAmount values.

If the employer has chosen to use the Set 1: Pensionable earnings basis or Set 2: Pensionable earnings basis, the pensionable earnings field will typically include any fixed remuneration (for example, salary, wages, statutory benefits such as: maternity, paternity, adoption and sick pay delivered through the payroll.) but will exclude variable amounts such as commissions, bonuses and overtime. However, if the employer uses Set 2: Pensionable earnings, in addition they’ll need to ensure that, taking account of all employees to whom this contribution basis applies, the average basic pay is always at least 85% of the average total pay.

If the employer has chosen to use the Set 3: Total earnings basis, the pensionable earnings field will typically include all fixed and variable pay components plus any additional pay.

The employerContributionAmount and employeeContributionAmount values should be calculated by your payroll software as percentages of the pensionableEarnings value if the worker is not in a worker group that has fixed contributions.

This field is mandatory for contribution requests with a payReferencePeriod after April 6th 2019. From that point, error D/AB01 will be returned if the value is omitted.

In the sandbox environment we will enable this validation at an earlier date, to be confirmed in the near future. This will allow you to test your software in advance of the change being enabled in the live environment.