The legal requirement
Most employees and workers are required to be issued with a payslip on or before each time they are paid.
Whether called a payadvice, pay packet, pay statement or payslip, employers are legally required to provide them.
The. payslips can be used as proof of earnings, tax paid and any pension contributions. Employers can choose whether they provide printed or electronic (online) payslips.
Payslips must be provided on or before payday.
Any breach would be Unlawful under the Employment Right covered by ERA 1996 and ERO (NI) 1996. However, there has not been a government enforcer other than the courts.
What must it show!
The payslip must show:
- earnings before and after any deductions
- the amount of any deductions that may change each time paid, for example tax and National Insurance
- the number of hours worked, if your pay varies depending on time worked
The jobs that are exempt
Employers do not have to provide one for the following:
- Those who are not an employee or ‘worker’, for example a contractor or freelancer
- in the police service
- a merchant seaman
- a master or crew member working in share fishing (paid by a share in the profits or gross earnings of a fishing vessel)
Failing to provide payslips is more prevalent than you would think!
The Working Lives report has found more widespread breach of basic employment rights such as the provision of a payslip, than would ordinarily have been expected.
Overall, the sheer prevalence of violations and other issues experienced over a relatively short period of time challenges received wisdomthat most businesses are compliant, and only a few ‘bad apples’ undermine labour standards.
Some breaches may be deliberate, others negligent, and others genuinely accidental or due to ignorance.
Regardless of intent, the identified scale of unlawful and potentially unlawful but certainly harmful behaviour suggests that in practice workers’ rights are likely breached at scale.
So how many do not receive a legally required payslip?
The Working Lives report holds statics for:
- Full Workforce (4.8%)
- Precarious workers (17.5%)
The results indicate UK workers are widely impacted by financial harms, administrative violations, and health and safety-related issues alike.
Prevalence rates varied substantially, however, depending both on the issue and population in question. Some were more common among precarious workers, others in the wider workforce
What’s a precarious worker?
The report define precarious workers as those meeting at least two of the following three criteria (for details, see Pósch et al., 2024):
1. low income (under £24,000, or less than two thirds of the approximate median pre-tax earnings of workers in the UK in March 2025)
2. working in non-traditional work (defined as any paid work other than being an employee in a single job, such as having multiple jobs, being self-employed, agency worker, working in the gig economy, doing an apprenticeship, or any combination of these)
3. coming from an immigrant and/or ethnic minority background and working at a small workplace (less than 50 people).
PAYadvice.UK 28/6/2026