Key takeaways
Minimum wage and leave pay increase
Employers must update payroll from April 2025.
Tribunal compensation limits revised
Higher caps apply to unfair dismissal claims.
Visa and sponsorship fees rise sharply
Budget for immigration cost changes in April.
National minimum wage (1 April 2025)
National Living Wage (21 and over): £12.21
18-20: £10.00
16-17: £7.55
Apprentice Rate: £7.55
Accommodation Offset: £10.66
Employment tribunal compensation (6 April 2025)
A week’s pay: £719
Max cap on the unfair dismissal compensatory award: £118,223 (52 weeks’ gross pay, if lower).
Minimum basic award in cases where a dismissal is unfair by virtue of health and safety, employee representative, trade union, or occupational pension trustee reasons: £8,763
Unlawful inducements: £5735
Max compensatory award for a failure to have a written policy on allocating tips, or for a failure to allocate and pay tips fairly: £5,135
Family leave payments (6 April 2025)
Maternity, adoption, paternity, shared parental, parental bereavement, and neonatal care leave pay: £187.18 (or 90% of earnings if lower)
Employers with a Class 1 NIC liability below £45,000 will be able to recover 108.5% of these payments
Statutory sick pay (6 April 2025)
SSP: £118.75 per week
Lower earnings limit: £125 per week
Statutory guarantee pay (6 April)
Guarantee pay: £39 per day
Immigration: fee increases (9 April 2025)
Skilled worker certificate of sponsorship fee: £525
Sponsors licence application fee for large sponsors: £1579
Skilled Worker visa applications made from in and outside of the UK: £115
Indefinite leave to remain applications: £3029
Electronic Travel Authorisation: £16
Health and care worker applications made from in and outside of the UK: £39
Off-payroll working: client size (1 April 2025)
HMRC has confirmed that the changes to the company size thresholds in the Companies Act 2006, commencing 1 April 2025, will be reflected in the off-payrolling rules. A private sector company is classed as small (although some types of company are never considered to be small), and therefore exempt from the off-payroll working rules, if it satisfies two or more of the following conditions:
it has no more than 50 employees;
its annual turnover is less than £15 million (an increase from £10.2 million); and/or
its balance sheet total is less than £7.5 million (an increase from £5.1 million).
However, due to the way the rules operate this will have no practical effect until April 2026 at the earliest.
