Help employees get an extra slice with salary sacrifice

Salary sacrifice benefits are an incredible way to help your employees get an extra slice of their salary, at no cost to your business. Same dough, more bread. 

But let’s face it ‘salary sacrifice’ isn’t the most alluring term. And it can get confusing for employees to work out just how much they can save. So we’ve put together this handy guide to explain how salary sacrifice works and answer common questions. Hold tight for some excellent bread puns…

First up, what’s all the bread about? 

You might have noticed a few bread analogies on our website and of course, who could miss our friend Loaf here. Basically, we found that using a simple loaf of bread is a good way to explain what we do. All you need to know is our friend Loaf represents you or your employee’s  monthly salary. Or your dough, if you will. Gogeta helps people use their loaf a bit differently, allowing them to pay for things before they’re taxed. So they get to keep an extra slice of their salary, without having to increase their dough. Magic! 

Here’s a real life example of how that works

The Gogeta workplace nursery scheme lets employees pay for their nursery bill via salary sacrifice. 

Without Gogeta Nursery it works like this. An employee gets paid £55,000 per year. They pay for their nursery fees (£1500 per month) from their take home pay, after they’d paid tax and national insurance. This leaves them roughly £2,038 for everything else. 

With Gogeta Nursery, they pay the same nursery bill (£1500 per month) before they get taxed. This means (after their nursery bill is taken care of) they’re left with £2,385 for everything else. Saving them £347 every single month.

Okay sounds great, what’s the catch? 

There is no catch. Salary sacrifice benefits effectively put money back in your employees' pockets every month, at no cost to your business.

But there are things you need to consider when offering salary sacrifice benefits to staff. Firstly, you need to ensure that the schemes you are offering comply with HMRC rules around which benefits are exempt from tax. This is why we always recommend working with a salary sacrifice benefits provider like Gogeta, which takes compliance as seriously as you do. 

Secondly, you need to ensure that the amount employees salary sacrifice does not take them below the National Minimum Wage. We've created this handy interactive Salary Sacrifice Affordability Calculator which is an easy way to check if an employee's salary sacrifice amounts take them below National Minimum Wage.

How much admin is required?

There’s no point having a great benefit that no one uses because it’s a pain to deliver. We designed Gogeta salary sacrifice benefits to be as simple and easy for HR teams to administer. All HR teams need to do is let employees know about the new benefit (we help with this), review any applications (all done in your online portal) and update payroll according to the salary sacrifice agreement. 

How do I sign up?

Gogeta offers a range of salary sacrifice benefits, including cycle to work and workplace nursery. Get in touch to discuss how we can help your employees get an extra slice today.