This post was updated on 6 July 2022 to give the correct benefit rates for the current financial year.
Hi Mike
I am a lone parent of two children.
I claimed Universal Credit in December 2019 when I got a new job.
Since then, every month I get a different amount.
My circumstances haven’t changed, and my wages have been exactly the same – only my travel expenses have varied.
What’s going on? Should they be counting my travel expenses as part of my wage? How do I sort this out?
Thanks
Ruby
Hola Ruby,
The Maximum UC
Universal Credit is worked out by calculating a maximum UC for your family.
This includes an allowance for you, allowances for children, a contribution to your childcare costs and an element for housing costs.
There are extra allowances for people with illnesses, disabilities or caring responsibilities.
The maximum UC is how much they would pay you if you were not in work.
The Effect of Wages
When you are are in work, part of your maximum UC can be held back, according to your wage.
Because you have children they let you keep the first part of your wage, which is called a work allowance.
This is £344 per month if you get help with rent or £573 per month if they are not allowing anything for housing.
It’s only wages over the work allowance that get taken into account.
UC works out 55% of the wages over the work allowance and the result (called a taper) is knocked off your maximum UC, to arrive at your actual UC.
Do Expenses Payments Count As Wages?
No!
Most people don’t have to report their wages to Universal Credit. Instead a system called Real Time Information is used.
Your employer must tell the tax system when they pay you, and then the tax office (HMRC) tells the DWP.
It seems that there is a communication problem somewhere along the line, and DWP are not getting the message that part of your payment is for travel expenses.
How To Sort It Out In Future.
Every month when you get your pay-slip, upload a jpeg of it to your Universal Credit journal and include a message that says something like: You can see from my pay-slip that I was paid £x,xxx.xx this month but £yyy.yy of this is for travel expenses. Please ensure that only the wage figure of £z,zzz.zz is used in working out my UC.
You might also want to talk to your employer to make sure that they are sending accurate information to HMRC.
What About The Past?
You can ask the DWP to look again at each of the months where they have counted your travel expenses as part of your wage.
Legally speaking you will be asking for a revision of the decisions in each month.
There is a time limit of one month after DWP makes a decision to ask for a revision, or 13 months if there are special circumstances
You should send in your wage slips a for each of the last 13 months explaining about the travel expenses and asking DWP to revise the decision for each of these months.
You should explain the special circumstances that caused the delay in asking for the revision.
Saying that you did not know that they were counting travel expenses as wage won’t usually count as special circumstances.
A worldwide pandemic that makes it difficult to get advice, probably will.
DWP are usually pretty accepting of late-revisions.
The DWP can even revise the decisions for the time before the 13 month limit if you can explain that it was them or HMRC (but not your employer) who made the mistake about the travel expenses.
🙂
Mike