HMRC has issued the following guidance about impending changes to the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme.

From 1‌‌ October, HMRC will pay 60% of usual wages up to a cap of £1,875 per month for the hours furloughed employees do not work.

What you need to do from 1‌‌ October

Continue to pay your furloughed employees at least 80% of their usual wages for the hours they do not work, up to a cap of £2,500 per month. You will need to fund the difference between this and the CJRS grant yourself.

The caps are proportional to the hours not worked. For example, if your employee is furloughed for half their usual hours in October, you are entitled to claim 60% of their usual wages for the hours they do not work, up to £937.50 (half of £1,875 cap). You must still pay your employee at least 80% of their usual wages for the hours they don’t work, so for someone only working half their usual hours you’d need to pay them up to £1,250 (half of £2,500 cap), funding the remaining portion yourself. For help with calculations, search ‘Calculate how much you can claim using the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme’ on GOV‌.UK.

You’ll also continue to pay your furloughed employees’ National Insurance and pension contributions from your own funds.

Make sure your data is right

It’s important that you provide all the data we need to process your claim. Payment of your grant may be at risk or delayed if you submit a claim that is incomplete or incorrect and we want to help you get this right. We’ll get in touch if we see any employee data missing from your previous claims.

Claiming for 100 or more employees – use our new template

The easiest way to provide us with the data we need is to use our updated template – to find it, search ‘download a template if you’re claiming for 100 or more employees through the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme’ on GOV‌.UK. 

To help prevent mistakes, the XLS and XLMS versions of the template now highlight any missing information you need to include in your claim before you submit it. Where information is missing, fields will be red and once the missing information is filled in, the data fields will turn green. You can also now flag if an employee has recently returned from statutory leave, to ensure claims with any new employees are processed correctly.

Claimed too much in error?

It’s important that you continue to check each claim is accurate before submitting it, and we would also recommend checking previous claims to avoid any penalties for claiming too much.

If you have claimed too much CJRS grant and have not repaid it, you must notify us and repay the money by the latest of whichever date applies below:

• 90 days from receiving the CJRS money you’re not entitled to
• 90 days from the point circumstances changed so that you were no longer entitled to keep the CJRS grant
• 20‌‌ October 2020, if on or before 22 July you received CJRS money you’re not entitled to, or if your circumstances changed.

If you do not do this, you may have to pay interest and a penalty as well as repaying the excess CJRS grant. For more information on interest, search ‘Interest rates for late and early payments’ on GOV‌.UK.