I write the guides on HoursHQ and built the calculators behind them.
Every statutory figure on this site is checked against GOV.UK, Acas or the legislation itself before it goes live, and carries the date it was last verified. Where the law is genuinely unclear, I say so on the page rather than quietly picking an interpretation and presenting it as settled.
Why the dates matter
A pay or entitlement figure without a date is not much use. Rates change every April, and a page that was right in 2024 is confidently wrong today with no visible sign of it.
That is not a hypothetical problem. While researching the redundancy guides I checked the statutory weekly pay cap across the first page of search results and found four of five sources wrong, including payroll providers and HR software companies. While writing about student loans I found sites publishing a Plan 5 threshold that has never existed.
So every figure here shows when it was checked. If that date is old, you can see that it is old and go to the source yourself.
How the figures get here
The calculators do not have rates typed into them. Every statutory figure lives in a versioned data file with the source it came from and the date it was verified, and the calculators, the guides and the rates table all read from that same file.
That means a guide cannot drift out of step with the calculator next to it, and the annual April update is one change in one place rather than a hunt through the site.
- Every result shows its working, step by step
- Every statutory rule links to the GOV.UK page or the legislation it comes from
- Every calculation is tested against worked examples before release
- Scotland and Northern Ireland are handled properly, not treated as England with a different label
Where I have been wrong
Two errors were caught during the writing of this site, both by checking figures that had already been drafted:
- A guide claimed that a birthday falling during a notice period added an extra half week to a redundancy calculation. It does not — you need a completed year of service at that age. The correct figure was 10 weeks, not 10.5.
- An example of enhanced redundancy pay gave a total of £12,000 where the correct figure was £15,000, because the weeks had been miscounted.
Both are recorded here deliberately. A site that has never published a correction is not a site that has never made a mistake.
Corrections
If you find something wrong, please tell me. Corrections are the single most useful thing this site receives, and I would rather be told bluntly than have a wrong figure sit here being read.
Point me at the page and, if you can, the source that contradicts it. I will check it, fix it if it is wrong, and update the verification date.
What this site is not
HoursHQ is an independent site. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to GOV.UK, HMRC, Acas or any government body.
Nothing here is legal, tax or financial advice. The calculators work out what the statutory rules produce for the figures you enter. They do not know your contract, your circumstances, or the facts of your case — and for anything that turns on those, you want Acas on 0300 123 1100, or a solicitor.
Nathan Cole writes and maintains HoursHQ.