National Minimum Wage monitoring that catches issues before payroll
UK employers offering salary sacrifice benefits have a legal obligation to ensure no employee's net pay falls below the National Minimum Wage after benefit deductions. Most platforms check this once — at the point of enrolment — and stop there. But NMW breaches don't only happen at enrolment. They happen when a salary changes, when an employee turns 21, when contracted hours are reduced, when the government raises the NMW rate in April. All of those events happen between enrolment windows, with no visibility and no alert.
The result is that most UK employers with salary sacrifice benefits are running a compliance risk they can't see. They find out about it when payroll runs, or when someone flags it, or when they don't.
A self-serve NMW compliance report, running continuously in the background
Ben now includes a self-serve NMW monitoring report in the platform. It runs a daily automated assessment of every employee's effective hourly rate against the current NMW threshold, accounting for all active salary sacrifice benefit deductions. You don't need to trigger it — it runs every day and updates automatically.
The report shows one row per employee, with a clear status for each: Pass, At Risk, Fail, Not Applicable, or Error. For any employee who isn't passing, the report shows the likely cause — salary deduction, age band change, NMW rate change, missing data — and the recommended action to resolve it. Filter by status, search by employee name, export to CSV. Weekly automated email alerts go to configured recipients every Wednesday, summarising the number of employees at risk or in breach ahead of the next payroll cutoff.
For employers who want an early warning before a breach becomes a payroll problem, there's a configurable buffer — set a percentage above the NMW rate, and the report flags employees who are approaching the threshold, not just those who've already crossed it.
Compliance that doesn't depend on someone remembering to check
This is the shift: NMW compliance was a point-in-time check. It's now a continuous process. The report surfaces problems before payroll runs — not after. For HR and payroll teams managing large workforces with multiple salary sacrifice benefits, this removes the manual monitoring burden and replaces it with a report that does the work.
