Unpaid wages or deductions from your pay: your rights

Does this apply to you?

• Money was taken from your pay, for example for a uniform, damage, a till shortage or training, and you didn’t agree to it in writing beforehand.
• You weren’t paid, or were paid short, including final pay or holiday pay when you left.
• You are owed notice pay or redundancy pay. Those are claimed differently. See dismissed without notice and redundancy pay.

This covers work in England and Wales.

What the law says

An employer may only deduct from a worker’s wages where a statute requires or authorises it, such as tax and National Insurance, where a relevant provision of the contract authorises it, or where the worker has previously agreed in writing (ERA 1996, s.13). A relevant provision means a written term you were given a copy of, or told about in writing, before the deduction. A contract change or written consent can’t cover something that happened before it.

If you are paid less than the wages properly payable, or nothing at all, the shortfall is treated as a deduction. That is how unpaid final pay is claimed. The exception is an error in working out the gross amount properly payable.

Deductions the rule doesn’t cover

Six kinds of deduction fall outside it (ERA 1996, s.14): recovering an overpayment of wages or expenses; a deduction after disciplinary proceedings held under a statutory provision; a deduction a statute requires to be paid to a public authority; a payment to a third party you agreed to in writing; a deduction because you took part in a strike or other industrial action; and a deduction, with your prior written agreement, to satisfy a court or tribunal order in your employer’s favour. Whether there really was an overpayment, for example, is a question of fact.

What counts as wages

Wages include fees, bonuses, commission and holiday pay, and statutory sick pay and statutory family-leave pay (ERA 1996, s.27). They don’t include expenses, loans or advances, pension payments, compensation for loss of office, or redundancy payments.

Holiday pay when you leave

The statutory entitlement is 5.6 weeks a year, capped at 28 days. That is the whole statutory entitlement, with bank holidays counted inside it. Your contract can give more. When you leave part-way through a leave year, your employer must pay you for the share of statutory leave you have built up but not taken (Working Time Regulations 1998, reg. 14). The days due are your annual entitlement, times the proportion of the leave year that has passed, minus the leave you have taken. Irregular-hours and part-year workers build up leave differently, and are paid for all leave built up but not taken.

If you took more leave than your share, your employer can only recover it where a relevant agreement says so, and any deduction must still meet the rules above.

Key dates and deadlines

The time limit is extended by ACAS early conciliation, which you have to go through before you can claim. Even within time, the tribunal can’t look at deductions from wages paid more than two years before the claim. Holiday pay can be claimed by two routes with slightly different starting points, so where they give different deadlines, work to the earlier one. Whether deductions form a series is a question of fact. Where it isn’t clear, work to the deadline for the earliest one. What changed on 1 October 2026.

What people in this situation usually do next

Most people gather their payslips, contract and any written agreement about deductions, and work out the pay date for each amount. Many put a written demand for the missing money to the employer, setting out what was deducted or unpaid and why it wasn’t authorised. If that doesn’t resolve it, the next step is contacting ACAS before the deadline.

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Related

• Tribunal deadline calculator
• What changed on 1 October 2026
• Dismissed without notice
• How redundancy pay is calculated
• Employment law information