HR and payroll for accountancy practices in the United Kingdom
Reviewed by Mellow Editorial Team, HR & payroll content team
Running HR and payroll for an accountancy practice carries a particular irony: firms that handle complex financial compliance for clients often find their own back-office administration surprisingly difficult to get right. The core obligations are the same as any UK employer, but the sector's specific workforce patterns — part-qualified staff on study support, seasonal peaks around filing deadlines, and a competitive talent market — create pressures that generic guidance tends to miss.
Employment contracts and day-one rights
Every member of staff needs a written statement of particulars on or before their first day. The Employment Rights Act 2025 has strengthened day-one rights further, so practices that have relied on probationary periods to defer entitlements should review their contracts now.
For accountancy practices, a few contract clauses deserve particular attention. Study support agreements — covering exam fees, study leave and what happens if a staff member leaves shortly after qualifying — must be carefully worded to be enforceable. Garden leave and non-solicitation clauses are common in the sector given that junior staff often build client relationships quickly; these need to reflect actual business risk rather than being copied from a template. Client contact restrictions in particular face scrutiny if they are too broad.
Payroll mechanics and HMRC compliance
Payroll runs on Real Time Information. You submit a Full Payment Submission (FPS) to HMRC on or before each payday, every time. Late submissions attract penalties, and practices — of all employers — tend to find this embarrassing.
Staff move through salary bands as they pass exams and gain qualifications. Each change needs a payroll update before the relevant pay period closes, not retrospectively where you can avoid it. Income tax applies through the PAYE system: the personal allowance sits at £12,570, with basic rate tax at 20%, higher rate at 40% and additional rate at 45%. Employee National Insurance runs at 8% up to the upper earnings limit and 2% above it. Employer NI is 13.8% on earnings above the secondary threshold.
Auto-enrolment pension contributions apply to eligible workers: the employer minimum is 3% of qualifying earnings, with employees contributing at least 5%. Many practices offer enhanced contributions as a retention tool — this is worth reviewing against what competitors are offering, particularly for newly qualified staff who are the most mobile.
Year-end obligations include issuing P60s by 31 May and filing P11Ds (for expenses and benefits) by 6 July. Accountancy practices frequently provide professional subscriptions — ICAEW, ACCA, CIMA and similar bodies — as a benefit. These are generally exempt from tax as approved professional fees, but the exemption must be confirmed against HMRC's approved list. Anything outside that list needs to go through a P11D or a PAYE Settlement Agreement.
Leave, sickness and study time
Statutory annual leave is 5.6 weeks — 28 days including bank holidays for someone on a standard five-day week. The real complexity for practices is managing leave around January self-assessment deadlines and the year-end audit busy season. Many practices impose a leave restriction window, which is lawful provided it is written into contracts or the staff handbook and applied consistently.
Statutory Sick Pay applies where staff meet the qualifying conditions. The tricky area for practices is study leave. Exam resit leave, revision days and results-day absences are not statutory entitlements; whatever the practice offers needs to be set out clearly in the study support policy and applied consistently, or disputes follow. A policy that gives paid study leave for a first attempt but treats resits differently is common and defensible — provided staff know the rules before they sit the exam.
Managing qualified versus part-qualified staff
Accountancy practices typically run a two-tier workforce: part-qualified staff studying towards ACA, ACCA or CIMA, and qualified accountants in more senior roles. The HR implications differ meaningfully between the groups.
Part-qualified staff are younger on average, often in their first professional role, and more likely to test employment protections they are newly aware of. Clear induction, written policies and prompt responses to queries matter disproportionately here. They are also the group most likely to leave immediately after qualifying, which is a genuine commercial risk. Retention strategies — enhanced pension, clear promotion criteria, salary benchmarking against the market — are more cost-effective than repeated recruitment and training cycles.
Qualified staff, particularly those at manager and director level, are more likely to raise issues around flexible working, partnership track expectations and equity arrangements. The Employment Rights Act 2025 changes around flexible working requests tighten the rules on how and when employers can refuse — practices should make sure their process reflects current law rather than the previous framework.
Record-keeping and confidentiality
HR records for staff at an accountancy practice sit alongside client files that are subject to professional confidentiality obligations. Access controls matter. Payroll data, disciplinary records and medical information held about employees must comply with UK GDPR, and the practice's privacy notice needs to cover staff data as a distinct category from client data — something smaller practices often overlook when they update their client-facing documentation but forget to revise their employee-facing equivalent.
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