Agricultural wages orders and the accommodation offset: what it puts on your payslip

The published figures

What it puts on, or takes off, the payslip

Rent, or Accommodation

A deduction for the place you live, shown in the deductions block. Section 8 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 requires every variable deduction to be shown with the purpose it is made for, so it should be named and not folded into a lump. A correct value is the charge your contract sets. Whether it is lawful is a separate sum: only the part above £11.10 for each day provided reduces the pay that counts towards the minimum wage.

Board and lodging, and the line that is not there

Where accommodation is provided free, most payslips show nothing at all, and that is right. The offset is not pay and does not belong in gross. It is added only in the minimum wage calculation, under regulation 9(1)(e), and only where the employer is not entitled to deduct or to receive a payment for the accommodation. A payslip that puts £77.70 into gross for a free cottage has invented earnings and will overstate tax, National Insurance and pensionable pay.

Dog allowance

£11.18 a week for each dog under the Welsh order and under Scotland's Order No. 73, which caps it at four dogs. The preserved English 2012 order carries £7.63 a week. It reimburses the cost of keeping and feeding a dog you are required to keep, so it is a separate line and not part of the rate your hourly minimum is measured against.

Night work allowance

£2.12 for each hour of night work under article 15 of the Welsh order, excluding the first two hours worked between 7pm and 6am. The preserved English 2012 order carries £1.36 an hour for the same thing. There is no equivalent in Order No. 73 or in Order No 106, so a night shift in Scotland or Northern Ireland attracts nothing extra unless the contract says so.

On-call allowance

Under article 15 of the Welsh order, a sum equal to three times your grade's hourly rate for each on-call period of up to 24 hours. Under the preserved English 2012 order it is two hours of overtime pay at your grade. Lambing, calving and harvest cover are where this appears, and on a Welsh Grade C worker at £13.48 that is £40.44 for a period on call.

Overtime at a rate an order set, not a contract

Wales requires at least 1.5 times your basic hourly rate under article 12. Scotland does the same by formula: articles 8(4) and 9(4) of Order No. 73 give the overtime rate as the minimum hourly rate multiplied by 1.5, and articles 8(2) and 9(2) keep the £1.91 qualification supplement out of overtime hours. Northern Ireland changed direction for 2026: Order No 106 pays overtime at the same hourly rate as normal hours. England has no order for anyone taken on from 1 October 2013, so overtime there is whatever the contract says and can lawfully be plain time.

Your grade

In Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland the grade is the thing the whole rate hangs on, and it should appear in your written statement of employment particulars. Wales runs Grade A to Grade E plus apprentices. Northern Ireland runs Grade 1 to Grade 5. Scotland has one basic rate plus the qualification supplement instead of a grade ladder.

Total hours worked

Section 8(2)(e) of the Employment Rights Act 1996 requires the total hours where pay varies by time worked, either as one figure or split by rate. On a live-in job this is the number the whole accommodation question turns on, because the minimum wage test is pay in the period divided by hours in the period, and the offset moves the top of that fraction while the deduction moves it the other way.

What goes wrong

A tied cottage charged at the market rent

The commonest underpayment in live-in land work. An employer lets a farm cottage at £600 a month, takes it from wages, and the hourly rate on the payslip still reads at or above the floor. It is the pay after the excess over the offset that has to clear the minimum wage. Over a 30 day month the offset covers £333, so on those figures £267 comes off the pay that counts. gov.uk's own worked example puts a worker on £12.90 an hour, above the £12.71 floor, below it at £12.65 once a £12.50 daily charge is netted against the offset.

A Welsh worker paid the English rate

An employer running payroll for holdings on both sides of the border, or a bureau using one National Living Wage figure for everyone, pays £12.71 to a Welsh Grade C worker who is owed £13.48. The gap is 77p an hour, which on a 39 hour week is £30.03, and nothing on the payslip flags it because £12.71 is a lawful rate somewhere. The test is where the work is: an agricultural worker is a person employed in agriculture in Wales, whether or not all the work is done in Wales.

Free accommodation added to gross pay

The offset is a figure used in one calculation, not a payment. Adding £77.70 a week to gross for a cottage provided free inflates taxable pay, employee and employer National Insurance and, where pensionable pay is defined as gross, pension contributions on both sides. It is the mirror of the first error and it costs the worker rather than the employer. Regulation 9(1)(e) only counts the offset where the employer is not entitled to deduct for the accommodation or to receive a payment for it.

A grade that was never uprated

Welsh Grade C, D and E rates have been £13.48, £14.79 and £16.23 since 1 April 2025 and Scotland moved to £12.71 on 1 April 2026, taking the formula overtime rate up with it. A payroll that hard codes a grade rate at the figure it held when the worker was taken on keeps paying it after the order changed, and nobody notices, because the National Minimum Wage validation in the payroll software passes: the stale grade rate is still above £12.71. Only a comparison against the order in force finds it.

The offset taken for a day the accommodation was not provided in full

Regulation 16(2) says living accommodation is provided for a day only if it is provided for the whole of a day. On seasonal and shift based live-in work the arrival day and the departure day routinely fail that test, and an employer charging a flat weekly figure for a five day stay has claimed seven days of offset. Article 14 of the Welsh order adds a second condition of its own: a deduction for accommodation other than a house needs at least 15 hours of work in that week, with annual leave and bereavement leave counted in.

Extras kept out of the accommodation charge

gov.uk treats rent and charges for things like gas, electricity, furniture and laundry as accommodation charges, and they are counted together against the offset. Billing the room at £10 a day and the utilities separately at £6 does not produce two charges below £11.10. It produces one charge of £16 a day, of which £4.90 a day comes off minimum wage pay. The rule also reaches a landlord who is not the employer, where the employer or a connected person owns or rents the property, or where an owner, partner, shareholder or director gets a payment or benefit from the landlord.

A salary sacrifice run against a live-in job

A salary sacrifice arrangement must not take cash earnings below the National Minimum Wage rates, and HMRC says employers have to cap the sacrifice so the rates are maintained. On a housed worker the headroom is already smaller, because any accommodation charge above the offset has come out of the pay that counts before the sacrifice is applied. A sacrifice sized against gross pay rather than against minimum wage pay is how an otherwise compliant scheme produces arrears.

What to check on your next payslip

• Your floor comes from the country the work is in: the Agricultural Wages (Wales) Order 2025, Scotland's Order No. 73, or Northern Ireland's Order No 106, each with its own grade ladder. There is no United Kingdom agricultural minimum wage. On Welsh Grade C the gap against the National Living Wage is 77p an hour, and an employer paying the National Living Wage to that worker is underpaying them lawfully nowhere.
• The offset sum is the number of whole days the accommodation was provided, multiplied by £11.10, set against the total your employer charged for the place you live. Only the excess over the offset reduces the pay that counts towards the minimum wage. The arithmetic is two numbers and it is the only test that tells you whether a lawful looking hourly rate survives the rent.
• Gas, electricity, furniture and laundry are accommodation charges too, and they are counted together with the rent against a single £11.10 a day. Splitting a charge into parts does not create two charges. An employer who compares each part with £11.10 separately will conclude the offset is not exceeded when it is.
• Where accommodation is free the offset belongs in the minimum wage calculation only, and nothing should appear in the gross pay figure for it. Sitting in gross, the offset is taxed, it carries National Insurance and it can inflate pensionable pay, none of which the rule intends. Regulation 9(1)(e) adds it to the minimum wage total, not to your earnings.
• In England the start date of your current employment is the fact that decides this, and for anyone taken on before 1 October 2013 the written statement of employment particulars is where the answer sits. gov.uk's overview page says those workers still have the 2012 Order's terms and conditions; its pay and overtime page says they keep the Agricultural Minimum Wage only if the contract says so. No instrument writing the preservation down was found, so the contract is where the 39 hour overtime trigger, the night rate, the on-call rule and the dog allowance either are or are not.
• Section 8 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 requires an accommodation deduction to be shown as its own line with the purpose it is made for. A deduction you cannot see is a deduction you cannot measure against the offset. The statement has to carry the amount of every variable deduction and what it is for.
• A salary sacrifice cannot take cash earnings below the National Minimum Wage, and on a housed worker the headroom has already been cut by any charge above the offset. HMRC requires employers to cap the sacrifice so the rates are maintained. A sacrifice set at a percentage of gross rather than against minimum wage pay can push the total below the floor without either figure looking wrong on its own.

The 10 occupations this reaches, and how

Each line is specific to that trade. Where a scheme depends on how you are engaged rather than on the work itself, the line says so.

Agricultural Engineer

Servicing the machinery is engineering, and the wages orders do not reach it. The definition in both the Welsh order and the Scottish Act is a list of land uses and of produce grown for a trade or business, and repairing a tractor is not one of them, so an engineer at a dealership or on a mobile service round is on the National Minimum Wage wherever in the UK the van is parked. Harvest call-out and standby payments come from your contract, not from an order, which is why they can be any figure at all. The accommodation offset still applies if an employer houses you for a seasonal posting.

Farm Worker

Your floor is set by the country the work is in, not by the farm or the employer. In England it is the National Minimum Wage; if you were taken on before 1 October 2013, gov.uk says in one place that the Agricultural Wages (England and Wales) Order 2012 terms are still yours and in another that you keep them only if your contract says so, so read your written statement rather than either page. In Wales the 2025 order puts Grade C at £13.48 an hour. In Scotland Order No. 73 gives overtime as a formula, the basic rate multiplied by 1.5. In Northern Ireland Order No 106 puts the Agricultural Worker grade at £13.30 and pays overtime at plain time. Same tractor, same crop, four answers.

Farmer

Farming on your own account there is no wages order in sight, because an order says what an employer must pay a worker and you are neither. Employed to run someone else's holding, you are the top grade in the order: Agricultural Manager Grade E in Wales at £16.23 an hour, Agricultural Manager Grade 5 in Northern Ireland at £14.44. The farmhouse is the other half of it. Lived in rent free, it adds £11.10 for each whole day to the minimum wage sum, and that is a different question from whether it is job-related accommodation for tax.

Forester

Woodland is inside the definition, which surprises people. Section 17 of the Agricultural Wages (Scotland) Act 1949 defines agriculture to include the use of land as grazing, meadow or pasture land or orchard or woodland, and article 2 of the Welsh order carries the same list, so woodland work forming part of a farming undertaking can sit under an order while commercial forestry run as its own business does not. The test is what the land is being used for, not what the job is called. And most tree work is invoiced by self employed contractors, where no order applies at all, because an order binds an employer paying a worker.

Gamekeeper

The tied cottage and the dog allowance land on the same payslip and pull against each other. Wales and Scotland both pay £11.18 a week for each dog you are required to keep and feed, Scotland up to four, and it sits outside the rate your minimum is measured against. Scotland then values a house provided without charge at £1 a week for the purposes of the wages order, and the value drops to nothing while a local authority notice says the house is unfit for habitation. That is a separate figure from the National Minimum Wage offset, which works the other way: free accommodation adds £11.10 for each whole day to the pay counted towards the minimum wage rather than reducing it. A keeper's house only cuts into minimum wage pay where the employer charges for it and the charge runs above £11.10 a day. Whether an order reaches you at all turns on the definition of agriculture, which is a list of land uses, so a keeper on a mixed holding and a keeper on a pure sporting estate are not in the same position.

Horticulturist

Market gardens and nursery grounds are named in the definition of agriculture in the Welsh order and in the Agricultural Wages (Scotland) Act 1949, so growing under glass or on a nursery is inside the wages orders even though nobody would call it farming. Scotland goes further than anywhere else in the UK and pays £1.91 an hour on top of the £12.71 basic for a listed qualification, with production horticulture at SCQF Level 6 or 7 and the Lantra issued Level 3 Modern Apprenticeship in production horticulture both expressly on the list. A horticulturist in a public park or a garden centre is in neither the definition nor the supplement.

Hotel Receptionist

Living in for night cover raises two rules in the same pay period and only one of them is the offset. Regulation 32(2) says that where you are permitted to sleep at or near the workplace and suitable sleeping facilities are provided, only the hours you are awake for the purpose of working count as time work. The room itself is then treated under the accommodation rules, at £11.10 for each whole day it is provided. So the hours at the bottom of the minimum wage fraction can shrink while the accommodation charge at the top grows, and the result has to clear £12.71 an hour on both moves at once.

Housekeeper

The exemption that used to keep live-in housekeepers outside the minimum wage has gone. Regulation 57(3) of the National Minimum Wage Regulations 2015 excluded work done in a private household by someone who was not family, lived in the employer's home, was treated as one of the family for living accommodation and meals, and paid nothing for them. It was omitted on 1 April 2024 by S.I. 2024/75, and that work counts as work now. Board and lodging does not fill the gap: accommodation counts at £11.10 a day and the meals count for nothing, because accommodation is the only benefit in kind the minimum wage recognises.

Kitchen Porter

A room above the kitchen counts for £11.10 a day and free staff meals count for nothing, which is the reverse of how a live-in season is usually described at the interview. The offset also runs in whole days: regulation 16(2) says living accommodation is provided for a day only if it is provided for the whole of that day, so on a seasonal contract the day you arrive and the day you leave earn the employer no offset at all. Any charge for the room above £11.10 a day comes straight off the pay measured against the minimum wage, and a separate utilities charge is added to the room charge rather than judged on its own.

Landscaper

Grounds maintenance is not agriculture for wages order purposes. Both the Welsh order and section 17 of the Agricultural Wages (Scotland) Act 1949 define agriculture as a list: dairy farming, consumable produce grown for a trade or business, land used as grazing, meadow or pasture, orchard, osier land or woodland, and market gardens or nursery grounds. Mowing a business park, maintaining a public open space and building a domestic garden appear nowhere in it, so a commercial landscaper in Cardiff is on the £12.71 National Living Wage and not on a Welsh grade. What does still reach you is the accommodation offset, on any job where the employer houses you.

Questions

Sources