From 6 April 2024, four new NI categories for Investment Zones take effect. With these categories, employers will receive a reduction to their Employer NI contributions when the following conditions are met:

• The employer have physical premises within an Investment Zone tax site
  
• The employee must spend 60% of their working time in the Investment Zone tax site
• The employee will no longer be eligible after 36 months of employment

Assessment

Neither Sage 50 Payroll or Sage technical support can assess eligibility for your employees. HMRC will not inform you of your or your employee's eligibility, and you must assess your employees using HMRC guidance.

 NOTE: HMRC don't require proof of eligibility, however they will perform validation and compliance checks against your RTI data.

New categories

The four new NI categories are D, E, K and N. These new NI categories are available to assign in the Employment tab of employee's records in Sage 50 Payroll v30.

These new categories are equivalent to existing categories as below.

 TIP: If you'd like to view the thresholds and rates for these new categories, visit our Class 1 National Insurance rates for 2024/2025 tax year guide. 

Further information

If you have an employee that'd normally use a different category (for example, mariners), you should use that category and contact HMRC at year end to manually access the relief. If you'd like to check an employee's NI category before you process it, contact HMRC.

HMRC don't require any specific reporting other than the inclusion of the relevant NI category in the Full Payment Submission (FPS). Sage 50 Payroll automatically includes this information in the FPS.