What to do if your employer has not paid you

Get the number right before you complain about it. Acas suggests working out what you expected after tax and deductions, checking the date you should have been paid, and comparing that with what actually arrived. Pull together the payslip, the written employment contract or statement of terms — which has to specify pay and when it is paid — the rota or timesheets for the pay period, and the bank statement showing what landed. If you cannot find a payslip, ask payroll — you have a statutory right to an itemised one.

Then check what you are claiming actually is wages, because the statutory definition is narrower than the everyday one. Section 27 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 defines wages as any fee, bonus, commission, holiday pay or other emolument referable to the employment, and expressly includes statutory sick pay, statutory maternity, paternity, adoption, shared parental, parental bereavement and neonatal care pay, guarantee payments, and qualifying tips, gratuities and service charges allocated to the worker.

Section 27 also excludes things people assume are covered: an advance or loan of wages, reimbursement of expenses incurred in the course of employment, a pension or retirement gratuity, a redundancy payment, and any payment made to you otherwise than in your capacity as a worker. Unreimbursed expenses and unpaid redundancy pay are real debts, but they are not unauthorised deduction claims, and go to the tribunal as breach of contract or under statutory redundancy pay's own longer deadline.

Final pay deserves separate arithmetic. Acas is clear that a worker should get their final pay on the date they are normally paid, so leaving mid-month usually means waiting until the ordinary payday rather than being paid on your last shift. GOV.UK states that the only time someone can be paid in place of statutory leave is when they leave a job, and that employers must pay for untaken statutory leave even if the worker is dismissed for gross misconduct — the point employers most often get wrong on the way out.

The mirror rule matters too: where a leaver has taken more holiday than they had accrued, GOV.UK says the employer must not take money from their final pay unless it was agreed beforehand in writing. A deduction for a training course works the same way — it needs a written agreement made before the deduction, not an invoice produced afterwards.

Now classify the problem. Section 13 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 says an employer must not make a deduction from a worker's wages unless it is required or authorised by a statutory provision or a relevant provision of the worker's contract, or the worker gave prior written consent. A 'relevant provision' has to have been given to the worker in writing, or its existence and effect notified to them in writing, before the deduction was made. Crucially, section 13 also treats a total shortfall in the wages properly payable as a deduction — so being paid nothing at all is a deduction of the entire amount.

Two limits sit on top of this. Deductions must never take you below the national minimum wage, apart from a capped accommodation offset. And for retail workers, GOV.UK confirms an employer cannot take more than 10 per cent of gross pay in any pay period to cover cash or stock shortages — though Acas notes that cap does not apply to the final wages of a leaver. If a deduction was made without a written contractual basis or your prior written consent, that is the claim, and say so in those words when you write.

Raise it informally first. Acas says it is usually best to raise the problem informally, following your organisation's policy or contacting your manager, payroll team or HR, because a genuine payroll error can be fixed the same day. Missed payments are frequently a bank detail typo, a starter form that never reached payroll, or a timesheet nobody approved. Ask what happened and when it will be corrected before escalating.

Then put it in writing, whatever they say. Acas advises confirming the details in writing after a verbal conversation so there is a record, and setting out four things: the amount you believe you are owed and why, the calculation showing the shortfall, the supporting evidence such as payslips, the contract, timesheets, rotas or pay agreements, and a request for a response within a specific timeframe — Acas gives seven days as an example. An email with a deadline in it is a far better document three months later than a chain of texts.

If the dispute is about the minimum wage, GOV.UK adds a step: you can ask the employer in writing to see their payment records. Employers must keep records adequate to show minimum wage compliance, and a written request for them is both a legitimate check and a signal that you know the rules.

Keep working while you do this, unless you have taken advice. Citizens Advice is direct about it — if the problem happened recently it is usually best to carry on working while you try to get your employer to pay you, because refusing to work could itself breach your contract and lead to dismissal. Withholding labour over a pay dispute is a much riskier move than it feels like at the time, and it can hand the employer a defence.

If the informal route fails, raise a formal grievance. Acas describes this as making a formal complaint to your employer, and says employers should follow a full and fair procedure in line with the Acas Code for any discipline or grievance case — investigating, allowing you to bring a relevant person to a grievance meeting, letting both sides have their say before a decision, and allowing you to appeal the outcome. Put the grievance in writing, use the word 'grievance', and keep the copy.

The reason to bother is evidential rather than optimistic. Acas states plainly that the procedure followed will be taken into account if the case reaches an employment tribunal. A grievance that was ignored, or answered with an admission that the money is owed but cannot be paid, is the strongest single document you can put in front of a judge.

If you are so far behind on pay that you are thinking about resigning, take advice before you do. Citizens Advice suggests speaking to an adviser first where you think the employer may never pay, and confirms that if you resign you can still take legal action against your employer. Union members should involve their representative at this point rather than at the tribunal stage, and Citizens Advice offers free help on 0800 144 8848.

You cannot go straight to a tribunal. Acas states that you must notify Acas if you want to make a claim to an employment tribunal — notification is compulsory, even though taking part in conciliation itself is voluntary for both you and the employer. You notify through the Acas online form or the helpline on 0300 123 1100, and it is free.

What happens next is that an Acas conciliator tries to help you reach a legal agreement with your employer. The conciliator speaks with each side separately rather than putting you in a room together. Acas is explicit about the limits of the service: it cannot represent you, cannot take your side or your employer's side, and cannot give you legal advice. It is a settlement mechanism, not an advocate.

Acas says early conciliation can last up to 12 weeks. In an unpaid wages case it is often much shorter, because the facts are usually simple and the employer either has the money or does not. Many of these disputes settle at this stage precisely because the employer wants to avoid the cost and disclosure of a tribunal for a sum that is not in serious dispute.

The time limit is paused while this runs — but only if you notified Acas inside your original time limit. That conditional is the whole game. Notifying Acas on day 95 of a 92-day period does not resurrect anything. Notify early, even if you still hope the employer will pay, because notification costs nothing and buys you the pause.

If the employer declines to take part, or you cannot agree, Acas issues a certificate with a number on it. That number is what you enter on form ET1 to lodge the claim, and you cannot lodge without it. Acas confirms that where you notified within your time limit, you will have at least one month from the date you received the certificate to make your claim.

If you do settle, Acas writes up the agreement as a COT3 conciliation agreement. Acas states this is legally binding and that once both parties have signed it, you will not be able to take your case to tribunal. Read it before you sign — particularly any wording that settles 'all claims' rather than the unpaid wages you were arguing about, because that can quietly close off a separate holiday pay or notice pay claim you had not got round to yet. Northern Ireland has an equivalent step with a different body and a different clock, covered further down.

The rule is three months less one day. Acas gives the worked example: you were paid the wrong amount on 1 May, so you add on three calendar months and take off one day. Section 23 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 sets the trigger as the date of payment of the wages from which the deduction was made — not the date you noticed, not the date the employer promised to fix it, and not the date they finally stopped replying.

Where there has been more than one missed or short payment, the clock runs from the last one. Section 23 provides that references to the deduction are to the last deduction in the series, so a run of underpayments is measured from the most recent, not the first. In practice, people still in the job and still being underpaid usually have more time than they fear, and people whose employment ended months ago usually have less.

How far back you can recover is a separate question from whether you are in time. Section 23(4A) says a tribunal must not consider so much of a complaint as relates to a deduction where the wages were paid before the period of two years ending with the date the complaint was presented. That two-year backstop was inserted by the Deduction from Wages (Limitation) Regulations 2014, made on 17 December 2014 and in force from 8 January 2015, applying to complaints presented on or after 1 July 2015. Certain categories of payment listed in section 27 are outside it.

Not every employment claim runs on three months. Acas notes that some claims have a limit of six months less one day, including statutory redundancy pay claims and equal pay claims. That matters here because unpaid redundancy pay and unpaid wages from the same dismissal can have two different deadlines, and it is easy to assume the shorter one applies to both.

A late claim is not automatically dead, but do not plan around it. Section 23 lets a tribunal extend time where it was not reasonably practicable for the complaint to be presented in time, and Acas puts it as bluntly as it can: if your time limit has passed you can still make a claim, and it is up to the judge to decide whether they will accept it. 'I did not know the deadline' is rarely enough. 'The employer told me it was being processed' sometimes is, and that is another reason to keep the emails.

Miss the tribunal deadline entirely and you are not necessarily without a remedy — Citizens Advice points to the small claims route as the fallback, because an ordinary claim for a contractual debt runs on a limitation period measured in years rather than months. It is slower, the fee is yours up front, and the court decides simply whether the money is owed.

The enforcement landscape now has a single front door, though not a single set of inspectors behind it. The Fair Work Agency is an executive agency sponsored by the Department for Business and Trade, established under the Employment Rights Act 2025, and describes its job as acting to protect workers, support fair competition and ensure employers comply with the law. Its own enforcement statement says it brings together enforcement functions previously exercised by multiple bodies and that it enforces labour market legislation across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, subject to the jurisdictional and prosecutorial arrangements in each nation. GOV.UK records that it replaced the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority on 7 April 2026, and that HMRC enforces the national minimum wage on the Agency's behalf — so a minimum wage complaint is still worked by HMRC officers, under the Agency's name.

Its statutory remit spans the Employment Agencies Act 1973, the Employment Tribunals Act 1996, the National Minimum Wage Act 1998, the Gangmasters (Licensing) Act 2004, the Fraud Act 2006, the Modern Slavery Act 2015 and the Employment Rights Act 2025. In plain terms, that means minimum wage, agency worker rights, gangmaster licensing, serious labour exploitation and — importantly for anyone who has already been to a tribunal — enforcement of unpaid tribunal awards.

The minimum wage complaint route runs on entirely different rules from a tribunal claim. GOV.UK's pay and work rights complaint form covers the national minimum wage, working time limits including the 48-hour week, employment agencies and the agricultural minimum wage, and states that you can report an employer even if you no longer work there. Acas adds that complaints can be anonymous and that third parties can make them on your behalf. There is no deadline of the kind the tribunal imposes, and no fee.

The reach is also longer. Acas states that HMRC — which enforces the minimum wage for the Fair Work Agency — can issue a notice to pay money owed going back a maximum of six years, against the two years a tribunal can consider under section 23(4A). For a long-running underpayment that is the difference between recovering the whole of it and recovering only the most recent slice. Penalties are separate from your arrears and go to the government: the Fair Work Agency's enforcement statement puts the civil penalty at 200 per cent of the total underpayment, capped at £20,000 per worker, with a 50 per cent reduction where all the unpaid wages and half the penalty are paid within 14 days, and Acas gives a minimum of £100 for each worker affected. Employers can also be publicly named.

There is one trap. GOV.UK states the complaint cannot be taken forward if you have already started tribunal action on a national minimum wage issue. Choose the route deliberately rather than firing off both, and if only part of what you are owed is a minimum wage shortfall, take advice on how to split it.

For a straightforward contractual debt, the county court is the third option. GOV.UK's money claim service lets you apply to a county court to claim money owed by a person or business, online or by post, in what used to be called the small claims court, and flags that Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own processes. It is the natural route where the tribunal deadline has gone, where the sum falls outside the statutory definition of wages, or where the employer is an individual rather than a company.

Check the status before you decide anything. Citizens Advice recommends looking your employer up on the Companies House register, where the entry will show whether a company is in administration, in liquidation or in receivership, and using the Individual Insolvency Register for a sole trader or partnership. A company that is formally insolvent and one that has simply stopped paying people are different problems with different remedies.

Where the employer is formally insolvent, you do not chase the employer at all. GOV.UK explains that the insolvency practitioner or official receiver dealing with the insolvency will give you a 'CN' case reference number, along with an RP1 fact sheet, and states plainly that you cannot claim without the CN number. You then apply to the government rather than to your former employer, and the money comes from the National Insurance Fund.

What that covers is specific. GOV.UK sets out up to eight weeks of money you are owed — unpaid wages, overtime and commission — up to six weeks of holiday pay, covering holiday accrued or taken in the 12 months before the insolvency, statutory notice pay of one week for every year employed up to a maximum of twelve, and statutory redundancy pay based on up to twenty years of service. Every one of those is capped at the same weekly figure, which GOV.UK gives as £751 per week from 6 April 2026, and £719 before that date. Anything above the caps becomes an ordinary claim in the insolvency, which usually returns little.

The order and the deadlines matter. GOV.UK says to apply for redundancy pay, unpaid wages and holiday pay first, as soon as you have been made redundant, and to apply for loss of notice pay only after you receive the reference number for it — the LN number, normally sent no more than 12 weeks after you are dismissed. Redundancy claims must be submitted within six months of being dismissed. The Redundancy Payments Service can be reached on 0330 331 0020 or at [email protected].

Your position depends on what happened to your job. GOV.UK distinguishes three cases: if you were made redundant you can apply for the payments above; if you are kept on you remain eligible to claim redundancy later but cannot claim wages, holiday pay or bonuses owed between the insolvency and your dismissal; and if you were transferred to a new employer you can only claim government money where the transfer happened after the insolvency.

If the employer is not formally insolvent — trading badly, ignoring you, or quietly winding down — the National Insurance Fund is closed to you. Citizens Advice sets out the alternatives: bring a tribunal claim within three months less one day for unpaid wages, or six months less one day for redundancy pay; or, if you believe they cannot pay their debts, apply to make them insolvent, which Citizens Advice warns is complicated, needs a solicitor and is often worth sharing the cost of with colleagues in the same position.

One option costs nothing and runs on a short clock. Where a company is trying to close down without going through insolvency, Citizens Advice says you can object to the strike-off through Companies House with evidence that you are owed money. A strike-off is advertised and runs to a short timetable, so the objection has to be made while the window is open — but it stops the company being dissolved and taking your debt with it.

A tribunal judgment is an order, not a transfer. GOV.UK notes that if you win, the tribunal can order compensation, witness expenses, a discrimination remedy or reinstatement — and that if you do not get your payment, the first step is to contact the respondent to find out why. It also flags that you cannot take enforcement steps if the respondent has appealed or is about to, and that they have 42 days to appeal.

The first lever is the penalty scheme, now operated by the Fair Work Agency. GOV.UK explains that where a respondent has not paid an employment tribunal award or an Acas settlement, the agency sends them a warning notice telling them they may be fined if they do not pay, and gives them 28 days to respond. If they do not, the agency may impose a penalty of 50 per cent of the unpaid award, of at least £100 and no more than £5,000.

Be clear about who benefits. GOV.UK states that the penalty goes to the government, not to you, and that the respondent must still pay you the money they owe. What the scheme hands you is not cash but a lever: the warning notice, the penalty and a place on a published list are all costs the employer avoids by paying the award. Applications go to [email protected].

The naming scheme runs alongside it. GOV.UK says you can ask for the respondent to be added to a list of respondents who have not paid employment tribunal awards, and that the list may be published on GOV.UK. For an employer that still trades and recruits, that is a real cost.

Then there is straightforward enforcement through the courts. In England and Wales, GOV.UK describes the fast track scheme, which sends a high court enforcement officer to demand payment from the respondent; the fee is £71, and it is added to the debt rather than absorbed by you. The alternative is a county court route, where a warrant to send a bailiff costs £83 if the respondent does not respond to the judgment notice by the deadline.

Scotland works differently in mechanism but not in effect. GOV.UK says you request an extract of the judgment, which a sheriff officer can then use to enforce payment. Employment law itself is the same, but the enforcement officers and the paperwork are Scottish.

If the employer becomes insolvent between the judgment and the payment — which happens more often than it should — GOV.UK confirms you can make a claim for money they owe you, including redundancy payments, through the insolvency route described above. Winning at tribunal does not disqualify you from the National Insurance Fund; it simply becomes the evidence of what you are owed.

In England, Wales and Scotland the position is identical. The Employment Rights Act 1996 applies across Great Britain, the time limits are the same, Acas covers all three nations, and the same tribunal system hears the claim — GOV.UK treats Scotland and Wales under the main process, with Welsh-language guidance available. What differs in Scotland is the enforcement machinery at the end, not the right or the deadline.

Northern Ireland runs a parallel system with different names and different bodies. Nidirect sets out the same core protection — an employer cannot make deductions unless required or allowed by law, you consented in writing, or your contract permits it, and a deduction must not reduce pay below the national minimum wage apart from a limited accommodation amount — and states that if raising it with the employer does not work, you have the right to go to an Industrial Tribunal to get your money. GOV.UK confirms there is a different way to claim if you live in Northern Ireland.

The Acas step is replaced by the Labour Relations Agency. Early conciliation came to Northern Ireland on 27 January 2020, and anyone wishing to lodge a claim with the Industrial Tribunal or the Fair Employment Tribunal must first notify the Agency and discuss the option of early conciliation. The LRA publishes a single number for its Belfast and Derry/Londonderry offices, 03300 552 220, and the Agency issues the early conciliation certificate you need before you can lodge. The Northern Ireland clock is also shorter than the Acas one: the LRA stops it for up to one calendar month, extendable by a further 14 days where a conciliation officer thinks settlement is in prospect and both sides agree.

One difference works in your favour. The LRA confirms that claims about unpaid wages, holiday entitlement or discrimination do not require one year's continuous service, whereas an unfair dismissal claim in Northern Ireland does in most circumstances need a year of continuous employment. Length of service is not a barrier to recovering money you have earned, in any part of the UK.

Procedure carries a sharper financial edge in Northern Ireland. The LRA states that industrial tribunals may adjust any award of compensation up or down by 50 per cent for a failure by either party to follow the relevant steps set out in the LRA's Code of Practice. That cuts both ways — an employer who ignored your grievance risks an uplift, and a claimant who never raised one risks a reduction — so the written grievance step is worth even more there than in Great Britain.

Enforcement bodies overlap. The Fair Work Agency's enforcement statement says its remit covers England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, so a minimum wage complaint is made to the same agency wherever in the UK you work. Court claims are the exception: GOV.UK points Northern Irish claimants to nidirect and Scottish claimants to mygov.scot.

Whichever nation you are in, the sequence does not change: establish the figure, ask in writing with a deadline, raise a grievance if ignored, notify Acas or the LRA before the three months are up, and use the Fair Work Agency for minimum wage underpayment and the Redundancy Payments Service if the employer is insolvent.