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Paying your employees at Christmas

Created on  | Last modified on 

Summary

The different ways you can pay your employees around the festive season using Sage 50 Payroll.

Description

Sometimes, you need to pay employees on a different date to normal over Christmas, due to bank holidays.

If you pay early or late this year, it's important that you submit the correct process date on your full payment submission (FPS).

Resolution

Paying early

If you pay your employees early due to a bank holiday, HMRC's advice is to use your normal pay day as your process date. This also applies if you're advancing pay over Christmas.

For example, your normal payday is 25 December, but you're paying your employees early on 24 December. You must:

  • Use your normal process date of 25 December 2025
  • Send the employees their pay on 24 December 2025
  • Submit your FPS on or before 24 December 2025

Doing this also helps to protect your employees' eligibility for Universal Credit where applicable. If you report their payday as a different date to the routine pay date, it can affect their entitlements.

Paying late

If you plan to pay your employees on the first working day after the bank holidays, use your normal process date still.

Bear in mind that if you send your FPS on a later date than your regular payday, you must select a late submission reason. We recommend you select 'Reasonable excuse'.

Integrated payment options

Your software includes options to make paying your employees easier. Select the relevant option below if you use one of these methods to find out more:

▼ Salary and Supplier Payments (SASP)

If you use SASP to pay your employees, there are some extra steps you must take to make your payments early.

To find out more, visit our salary and supplier payments - processing over bank holidays article.

▼ E-Banking

If you use e-Banking to pay your employees, ensure you set the correct payment date:

  1. Process the payments using your regular payment date.
  2. Submit the FPS as normal.
  3. Run e-Banking as normal, but ensure you set the payment date to the correct date to pay early or late.
     TIP: If you're not certain which date to enter, contact your bank to check. Depending on your e-Banking component, the payment date field sometimes has a different name, for example 'crediting date'.