Important Payroll Notice – Week 53 2022

Do I need to process a week 53 this year?

Week 53 takes place when a company pay date falls on 5th April. This year 5th April falls on a Tuesday. Each year is made up of 365 days or 52 weeks and 1 day, when the extra day falls on your company payday, week 53 comes into effect. If your employees are paid 2-weekly or 4-weekly, this may be displayed as T54 or F56 rather than week 53 in the software.

If your payslip date (the date which your employees receive their payment) does not fall on 5th April 2022, you can proceed to migrate your data into the 2022/23 software and pay week 1.

Does week 53 apply to monthly processed employees?

If all employees are paid monthly, you can process your payroll as normal. Please disregard this blog post if this is the case.

How will Tax & NI be calculated?

The NI calculation for week 53 will be processed exactly the same as every other pay period. The only change will be for tax calculations, altering every employee to a week1/month1 equivalent of their tax code.

Qtac will perform this action automatically when processing week 53. The software will ignore all previous tax and pay for the year and will perform a standalone calculation in that pay period.

By processing a week 53 payment an employee could inadvertently claim an extra week’s worth of tax-free allowance taking them over the annual threshold. In this scenario, an adjustment in the new tax year will be required and HMRC will issue a P800 form to any employee owing tax. Typically, any tax owed will be automatically collected in instalments in the new tax year. However, if this is not possible, they will write to the employee directly.

Can I avoid a week 53 calculation?

It is not possible to avoid processing a week 53 payment if your employee’s payday falls on the 5th of April. Failure to process a week 53 payment when required will misalign your pay dates.

Further information

For further information about the week 53 process, please visit HMRC’s guidance page:

https://www.gov.uk/payroll-annual-reporting/send-your-final-payroll-report#week-53-payments

If you have any questions about week 53 payments, you can contact our support team on 0117 9353500 (option 1) or by emailing support@qtac.co.uk.

If you would like to read more about the year end processes within Qtac, you can visit the year end procedure article within our Knowledge Base:

https://support.qtac.co.uk/support/solutions/articles/17000085768-end-of-year-procedure