Last update 22 June 2023
List of 34 businesses and organisations making £2.6 billion in cost of living payments to 1.3 million employees
In the tables below, we have summarised a full list of 34 businesses, organisations and other employers making one-off payments to staff to help with the cost of living crisis.
The list covers over £2.5 billion of payments made to over 1.34 million UK employees. While it does not cover every company or organisation, it is the most comprehensive and up-to-date list available.
Average employer cost of living payment (excluding NHS award)
Because the NHS pay deal dominates the averages, by virtue of the number of employees affected as well as the size of the average award, we have split it out in order to give a better idea of the underlying averages.
Excluding the NHS pay award, the average (mean payment) is just under £1,000 (£976 to be precise). This figure is distorted by below average payments made by a small number of employers who employ large numbers of staff. Median and mode cost of living payments are in the £1,000 to £1,200 range. These represent over 60% of the payments made. Cost of living payments range from a measly £200 to a positively generous £5,000.
Average employer cost of living payment (including NHS award)
Including the NHS pay award, the average (mean payment) jumps to over £1,900.
Biggest cost of living payment (per employee)
Shell made average bonus payments of $6,000 (£5,000) to 5,000 UK employees for their “contribution … to Shell’s strong operational performance”.
Other notable payments are;
- NHS England / public health provider – £2,315
- Cummins, the power technology / engineering firm – £2,300
- Rolls Royce, the aerospace and defence engineering firm – £2,000
- Moneysupermarket – the financial services price comparison site – £2,000
Largest cost of living payment (by company)
The largest payment, by a country mile, was by NHS England. Not only is NHS England the largest employer in the UK by an extremely wide margin (1.2 million FTE staff), but its one-off cost of living awards were around twice the average of other employers. This brought the total bill NHS award bill to around £2.3 billion.
The largest payment by a private sector employer, at £64 million, was by Lloyds Bank. This is due to the fact that it has a LOT of employees, and it made its £1,000 cost of living payment to virtually all of them
In contrast, HSBC, which has some 40,000 employees in the UK, only made a payment to less than half of those, and so kept its payment to a relatively miserly £27 million
Smallest cost of living payment (by company)
Serco made a £9m one-off payment to all “colleagues outside management grades”. But because this was spread across 45,000 staff, each employee received only £200. Still, credit where credit is due. It is better than the 95% of companies that have no payments at all.
Companies making cost of living payments
With households struggling to make ends meet in the largest cost of living squeeze in a generation, companies, academic institutions and public sector organisations are stepping in to make up some of the shortfall in household budgets.
According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), approximately 5% of businesses with 250 or more employees offered a one-off cost of living payment to their employees in the three months to end June 2022. This compares with only 1% for businesses with fewer than 250 employees.
How much are these cost of living payments? Who is making them? When will they be paid? And what difference will they make?
To answer these questions, we have compiled a full list of all the companies who have announced cost of living payments. If your company has, or is making a payment, but is not on the list, please let us know by adding a note in the comments at the bottom of the article.
To put these cost of living payments into context, let’s first step back and look at the bigger picture.
Inflation and the Cost of Living Crisis
CPI inflation hit 11.1% in October 2022. (RPI 14.2%). This was nowhere near as bad as the 13.3% predicted by the Bank of England in its August 2022 Monetary Policy report, but only because the Energy Price Guarantee introduced by Liz Truss subsidised domestic energy bills by around £1,000 compared to what they otherwise would have been.
Since then, the inflation outlook has improved. CPI inflation fell to 10.1% in January 2023 (RPI 13.4%). The Bank of England currently forecast that CPI inflation will fall sharply, to just under 4% by the end of 2023. But in the here and now, there is no getting away from the fact that households across the UK are feeling the biggest inflationary squeeze in a generation.
The largest component of this inflationary squeeze is energy prices. Not only do energy prices impact directly on the energy bills of households, but they also feed into the input costs of businesses. This in turn manifests itself in rising prices for both manufactured goods and services. Silvana Tenreyro, a member of the Bank of England’s interest rate setting Monetary Policy Committee, estimated that 8 percentage points of October 2022’s 11.1% inflation print came from energy prices. 8% points!!!!
The average energy bill increased by 54% (£693) to £1,971 on 1 April 2022. It increased by a further 27% (£529) to £2,500 on 1 October 2022 under the Energy Price Guarantee. From 1 April 2023 it will increase again, by a further £500 (20%) to £3,000. Barring the resumption of energy switching, energy bills could stay at that level until 31 March 2024. That will leave energy bills in 2023 and 2024 around 3 times the level they were in 2020.
The outlook for the next 12 months looks grim. What can be done about it and by whom?
Balancing the household budget in a cost of living crisis
How will consumers be able to make up for the shortfall in their household budgets from the highest inflation in 40 years and particularly from sharply higher energy bills?
While almost all recent attention has been focussed on what government needs to do to tackle the problem, government is, fortunately, by no means the only solution to the problem.
Balancing a tight budget requires either more income, lower expenses, or a combination of the two. There are several possible ways in which the gap can be bridged.
These include;
- Higher wages
- Reducing your outgoings and cutting back on energy usage specifically
- Using savings
- Getting government support
- Employers helping staff with cost of living payments
While this article focusses primarily on the last of these, we will briefly address each in turn.
1. Higher wages
The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics showed that average total pay, including bonuses, grew by 5.9% between October and December 2022 while regular pay excluding bonuses grew by 6.7%. This basic pay growth is the the fastest growth rate on record, outside of the Covid-19 pandemic period. Adjusted for inflation (which fell slightly to 10.5% in December 2022), total pay fell by 3.1% while regular pay both fell by 2.5%.
As wage growth has started to increase against a backdrop falling inflation, the real cut in peoples wages has started to shrink. The Oct/Dec 2022 real wage cut is far smaller than the record fall in real total pay the United Kingdom saw in February to April 2009 (4.5%) in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Nevertheless, it still remains among the largest falls in real wage growth since comparable records began in 2001.
Note; the ONS uses average inflation over the reporting period rather than over a single month. Hence the reason why wage growth + real wage ≠ CPI inflation in the figures above. In case you were wondering.
While wage growth is still lagging behind inflation, some sectors of the economy are doing better than others. Indeed, some workers are doing rather well. For example, think striking tube drivers whose 4-year RPI+ wage deal saw them pocket a pay rise of around £5,000 in April 2022 taking the median salary to mouth-watering….wait for it…. £64k, give or take. And don’t forget their cushy pensions and 43 days a year holiday on top.
The reality for most workers is that, although wage growth would normally be the biggest contributory factor to balancing the household books, for most, it is not keeping up with inflation. And although the labour market is still incredibly tight, with payroll employment at or near record highs, unemployment the lowest in 40 years, and job vacancies very high, looking for a new job just to pay the energy bill does seem a bit much. But it is an option.
2. Lower Energy Bills
If GCSE Economics text books are remotely correct, then the one thing that higher energy prices will do, is to reduce demand for the product. And with energy prices rising 3-fold over a 2-year period, we would expect household energy demand to fall quite sharply. Possibly by as much as 20%, but certainly by at least 10% compared to last year. That will save households between £300 and £600 based on the 2023/2024 energy price guarantee of £3,000.
At the level of the economy, this cut in energy usage alone will save consumers between £8 billion and £16 billion.
3. Savings
No-one wants to be dipping into their savings for day-to-day expenses. Savings are typically there for retirement, for a deposit on a home, for special occasions (holidays), and for the occasional rainy day or emergency. In ONS economics jargon, savings are there to increase future resources available for consumption (intertemporal saving) and to protect against unexpected changes in income (precautionary saving aka “saving for a rainy day”). However, the reality is that many of us will have no option other than to dip into that savings buffer. Because, like it or not, those “rainy days” have arrived en-masse.
However, on the savings front, there is a silver lining.
During the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, there has been a surge in household saving. This is mainly down to the fact that, with millions having been locked in their homes and paid NOT to work, it became difficult to spend the £100’s of billions thrown at rescuing the economy from the effects of COVID and lockdowns. Money was saved largely because there was nothing to spend it on (forced saving).
To June 2022, the ONS estimated that the total accumulated increase in household saving, relative to the level in Quarter 4 2019, was £195.9 billion.
And that is a huge pile of money.
Excess savings could pay for higher energy bills for over 2 years
It equates to almost 9% of GDP. It could pay the £2,000 excess (above 2020 energy price levels) on a £3,000 energy bill for every household in the country for a period of 3 years and 6 months.
We have no idea who has all that money. We know it is not us. However, some people clearly made out like bandits from Rishi’s billions. We suspect that a lot of the highly paid, work(?) from home, civil servant types at Ofgem will be in that lucky group.
That £195 billion of excess savings will certainly not be evenly distributed across the economy. Many, if not most of us, will not have benefitted at all. However, the sheer scale of the number is such that it cannot be ignored.
4. Government Support
The government has, so far, provided cost of living support of around £24 billion (1.1% of GDP). This has been, quite rightly, primarily targeted at the lowest income and most vulnerable groups. (Note; The government claims £37 billion of support, but that includes national insurance and tax cuts. We consider tax cuts to be ongoing government business as usual as opposed to one-off exceptional support targeted at a specific economic problem. Hence the reason that we do not include it within the cost of living support package).
The government is being, quite rightly, pressurised to do more; much more. We expect that the current cost of living package will get a hefty boost in the not do distant future.
5. Firms helping staff with cost of living payments
And finally, there are the firms making one-off cost of living payments to staff to help ease the cost of living crisis.
According to the ONS Business insights report on the UK economy (11 Aug 2022), approximately 5% of businesses with 250 or more employees offered a one-off cost of living payment to their employees in the three months to end June 2022. In comparison, only 1% for businesses with fewer than 250 employees offered such a payment.
We suspect that firms are not doing this just out of generosity or altruism. According to business surveys, recruiting and retaining staff, even in the current downturn, is one of the biggest issues facing business in what is still a very, very tight labour market. So, it makes sense to keep your existing staff happy, or at least happy-er, if you can afford to. It also makes sense to do this as one-off payments as these do not increase the recurring cost base of the business. These one-off payments should also have less of an impact on entrenching inflation in the economy.
The fact that, proportionately, far more larger companies are making these cost of living payments compared to smaller companies almost certainly reflects the greater pricing power of larger businesses (their ability to pass on the extra costs through price increases to consumers).
How many companies have made cost of living bonus payments
ONS data shows that there are approximately 10,000 companies in the UK with greater than 250 employees. They collectively employ a total of 16.5 million workers (approximately 55% of the UK workforce). A further 2.7 million smaller firms employ the remaining 13 million people in the workforce.
This implies that 500 larger firm and 27,000 smaller firms have made these payments.
Assuming that these employer cost of living payments are randomly distributed across firm size, then we can infer that approximately 825,000 employees at larger companies, and 130,000 employees at smaller companies have received these payments. Based on an average cost of living payment of £1,000, that equates to a cost of living bonus of £955m (approximately £1 billion rounded).
This is small change compared to the other budget balancing measures outlined above. But, as one catchy retail marketing slogan goes, “every little helps”.
List of employers making cost of living payments
The data in the tables below is drawn from public announcements by companies, trade unions, and trade associations and from newswires. We have aimed to make it comprehensive in terms of the coverage of the larger firms. Some smaller firms are also included, but it would not be possible, or practical, to list all 27,000 smaller firms even if we knew who they were.
What counts as a cost of living payment?
For incluion in the list we have looked for payments that are one-off in nature. This could be any of the following….
- One-off exceptional payments
- One-off non-regular bonuses
- Exceptional bonuses
…paid to employees in the UK
What is not included?
We have excluded the following;
- Pay increases, that increase the overall wage bill
- Regular bonuses
- Golden hello’s paid to new recruits only
- Any cost of living payment made to employees outside the UK
However, to do justice to employers who have made multiple pay rise rounds, we have listed them separately below the respective table summarising the payment made.
Examples of cost of living bonus payments
So, for example, Morrisons’ decision to increase salaries twice in one year, while probably motivated by the cost of living crisis, does not qualify, since it is a permanent increase in the wage bill. Similarly, Barclays decision to bring forward a pay increase from March 2023 to August 2022 is also a pay rise, and not a bonus or salary supplement.
Regular bonuses, which form a regular variable part of total compensation in certain sectors, particularly in financial services, are also excluded. They are part of the ongoing compensation of the employee.
However, one-off bonuses that are not part of regular compensation are included. For example, Shell’s decision to hand out a $500m bonus to 82,000 employees globally was a one-off, due to exceptional business performance. While it wasn’t described as a cost of living payment, a one-off bonus payment during a cost of living crisis is, pretty much, exactly that.
Golden hello’s (a bonus paid to an employee to incentivise them to join a company) do not qualify. They are part of the cost of hiring staff in a tight labour market. Therefore, British Airways £1,000 “golden hello” bonus doesn’t make the list. However, because EasyJet is paying a £1,000 bonus to both new and existing cabin crew, that payment counts.
Finally, as we are specifically interested in the impact of these bonus payments on the UK cost of living crisis, only payments made to UK employees are considered. Payments made to a global or international workforce are apportioned to the estimated UK workforce receiving that payment.
Limitations of the Data
We accept that our approach is by no means perfect. In our defence, the lines between what counts as salary, bonus, and one-off payments are all very blurred. So, perfection was never going to be possible. Nevertheless, it will (hopefully) give you a picture of who is paying what, to whom, and when.
If your firm or employer has made a cost of living payment, but is not on the list, please let us know via the comments at the bottom of this article. Provided that we can verify the payment, we will include it. Conversely, if any of the data listed is incorrect, please also let us know.
List of firms making cost of living payments (A – D)
| Company | Cost of living payment | Employees benefiting | Total cost of payment | Payment Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aviva | £300 - £1,000 | Not diclosed | Not diclosed | Oct 2022 |
| Employees earning less than £35,000 to receive payments ranging from £300 to £1,000 | ||||
| Barratt Developments | £1,000 | 6,000 | £6 million | Paid over six months from Jul 2022 to Dec 2022 |
| Temporary salary supplement to all employees below senior management level | ||||
| Bird and Bird | £1,000 | 300+ | £0.3 million | Jul 2022 |
| Paid to over 300 employees earning less than £50,000 a year. £1,000 payment is after tax and NI. | ||||
| Bloomsbury | £1,600 | 700 | £1.1 million | Not disclosed |
| All 1,000 staff qualify o/w 700 are in the UK. Value of bonus award is calculated at 6% on an assumed base salary of £30,000 | ||||
| Cardiff University | £500 | 6,000 | £3 million | Nov 2022 |
| A one-off payment of £500 was paid to all staff on Grades 1 – 8 and Clinical pay scales D1 and D2. This excludes senior professors and clinical consultants. The number of employees affected and the overall cost of the payout were not disclosed. Cardiff University has around 7,000 full time equlivant staff. We estimate that the vast majority of these received the payment. | ||||
| Cartwright Group | £1,000 | 43 | £0.04 million | Not disclosed |
| We assume all 43 employees got the payment | ||||
| Caterpillar | £1,300 | 1,500 | £2 million | Not disclosed |
| A one-off lump sum of 2.6% on an estimated average salary of £50,000 | ||||
| Clifford Chance | £1,500 | 200 | £0.3 million | Not disclosed |
| A lump sum of £1,500 paid to trainees and business services professionals in London. Chambers student estimates the firm has 200 trainees in London. | ||||
| Co-operative Bank | £300 | Not disclosed | Not disclosed | Not disclosed |
| For employees earning less than £30,000 | ||||
| Cummins | £2,300 | 2,730 | £6.3 million | Aug 2022 |
| The payment was negotiated by Unite and covers workers at the company’s factories in Darlington, Daventry, Huddersfield, Stamford and Wellingborough. | ||||
| Sources: energyscanner.com; Unite, company websites, various news feeds |
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Barclays
More than 35,000 staff at Barclays received a £1,200 pay rise on 1 August 2022 to help with the cost-of-living crisis. The salary increase was targeted towards lower paid employees and saw average salaries increase by between 4.7% and 5.5% depending upon grade. The increase brought forward part of a pay review scheduled for March 2023. All other staff will see their annual pay review take effect in March 2023 in the normal way.
Companies making cost of living payments (E – H)
| Company | Cost of living payment | Employees benefiting | Total cost of payment | Payment Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| easyjet | £1,000 | 7,000 | £6 million | Oct 2022 |
| New and existing cabin crew will receive a £1,000 bonus at the end of Oct 2022 for their efforts during this summer's travel boom. According to Companies House the vast majority (if not all) flight and ground crew are employed by UK registered easyJet Airline Company Limited. Hence we assume all 7,000 cabin crew receive the payment. |
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| Hastings Direct | £500 | 2,500 | £1.3 million | Oct 2022 |
| Employees earning up to and including £45,000 received a £500 bonus in October 2022 pay-packet. This was on top of a minimum 5% pay rise made at the same time. The number of employees getting the one-off bonus was not disclosed. We estimate that around 75% of Hastings 3,300 employees would have qualified for the payment. | ||||
| Heinz | £1,200 | 700 | £0.8 million | Aug 22 and Jan 23 |
| Initial £500 paid in Aug 2022. The second £700 payment will be made in Jan 2023 subject to attendance. We are guessing that maybe Hienz is experiencing a staff absence problem and only wants to reward those that actually turn up to work. | ||||
| HSBC | £1,500 | 18,000 | £27 million | Jul 2022 |
| To the lowest paid workers. Unite are taking the credit for this one. | ||||
| Sources: energyscanner.com; Unite, company websites, various news feeds |
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List of firms making cost of living payments (I – M)
| Company | Cost of living payment | Employees benefiting | Total cost of payment | Payment Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Irwin Mitchell LLP | £900 | 2,500 | £2.25 million | Apr 2022 |
| Paid to all UK staff below partner level. We assume this be around 2,500 employees. | ||||
| King Charles III | £300 - £600 | 350 | £0.2 million | Nov 2022 |
| According to the Sun newspaper, staff working for King Charles III will receive a one-off payment of between £600 and £350 depending upon their salary. Those earning less than £30,000 will get £600. Those earning between £30,000 and £40,000 will get £400. While those earning between £40,000 and £45,000 will get £350. There are apparently 491 full time staff employed at the palalces. We have assumed that just over 70% (350) receive an average payment of £475. But this is pure guesswork on our part. | ||||
| Lloyds Bank | £1,000 | 64,182 | £64 million | Aug 2022 |
| The payment was made to staff in grades A – G. That covers 64,182 employees, or around 99.5% of the firm's work force. | ||||
| Moneysupermarket.com Group | £2,000 | 375 | £0.75 million | Sep 2022 |
| Announced with the companies interim results, the payment will cover all employees earning less than £55,000 a year (almost half its workforce). We assume this to be 375 of their 780 employees. On a different note, if you are looking for a tech job, worth noting that more than half of Moneysupermarket employees earn over £55k. Nice! | ||||
| Monzo | £1,000 | 1,600 | £1.6 million | Not disclosed |
| Employees earning less than £40,000 per year received a one-off payment of £1,000. The number of employees affected has not been disclosed. Around 65% of Monzo's 2,500 employees work in customer service roles. energyscanner.com estimates that only these employees qualify for the payment. | ||||
| Sources: energyscanner.com; Unite, company websites, various news feeds |
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M&S
M&S has increased pay rates twice in 2022.
From 1 October 2022, more than 40,000 workers will see their minimum pay rise from £10.00 / hour to £10.20. It will increase the company’s annual wage bill by £15 million. This follows on from the first pay review which saw hourly rates increase from £9.50 to £10.00 in April 2022.
The two pay reviews combined means that eligible employees have seem minimum rates of pay increase by 7.4% in 2022. Still below the rate of CPI inflation.
M&S has also rolled out additional smaller benefits. 4,500 salaried staff on pre-management levels are getting a one-off £250 M&S voucher, staff at its Distribution Centre in Castle Donington will get a free meal per shift and employees across all stores and sites qualify for free sanitary products.
List of companies making cost of living payments (N – R)
| Company | Cost of living payment | Employees benefiting | Total cost of payment | Payment Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nationwide Building Society | £1,200 | 11,000 | £13 million | Not disclosed |
| The payment was made to 61% of Nationwide’s 18,000 workforce; those earning less than £35,000 a year. | ||||
| NHS England | £2,179 | 1,062,500 | £2,315 million | Jun 2023 |
| Over 1 million NHS staff in England will receive 2 one-off payments averaging £2,179 in addition to their 2022/23 and 2023/24 salary increases. Full details provided in the content below this table. | ||||
| Oxford University | £1,000 | 14,572 | £15 million | Jul 2022 |
| The one-off £1,000 bonus paid to all employees was to recognise their "commitment and dedication" through the pandemic. However, to all intents and purposes it meets the one-off cost of living criteria. For those who are as surprised by the figures as we were...Oxford University does, in fact, employ over 14,000 staff (14,572 on 31 July 2021) making it the largest employer in Oxfordshire. That is a staff : student ratio of 4:7. That is some personalised education right there. Enough said. |
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| Rolls Royce | £2,000 | 14,000 | £28 million | Aug 2022 |
| The payment, for junior management and shop floor staff, covers approximately 70% of the company's UK workforce. | ||||
| Sources: energyscanner.com; Unite, company websites, various news feeds |
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NatWest Group
NatWest announced a permanent increase in base pay, averaging £1,000, for more than 22,000 staff members globally. In the UK, employees earning a full-time equivalent salary of £32,000 or less will receive a 4% salary increase. This will affect 17,300 employees in the UK. Although this pay increase was widely reported as a cost of living payment, it is in fact a permanent pay rise and so is not included in the table of one-off payments.
NHS
Analysing the NHS pay award
We have detailed and analysed the 2022/23 and 2023/24 NHS England pay award in slightly greater detail due to (a) its slightly greater complexity but mainly (b) due to the sheer size of it relative to other cost of living payments.
NHS unions in England have reached a pay deal with the Government covering the years 2022/23 and 2023/24. The offer was recommended and voted for on 2 May 2023. The non-consolidated payments were made in June 2023.
The pay awards applies to NHS staff (in England) including nurses, paramedics, 999 call handlers, midwives, healthcare assistants, security guards and cleaners.
The pay deal has the following components
Salary increases
- The salary increase of (at least) 4% for 2022/2023 previously announced in July 2022
- A further salary increase of 5% for the financial year 2023/2024
One-off payments
On top of the 2022/23 pay award, affected staff will receive 2 additional, one off non-consolidated payments
- A non-consolidated award worth 2 per cent
- A one-off NHS backlog bonus worth between £1,250 and £1,600
Non-consolidated payments are one-off, non-pensionable awards made to staff. These payments do not affect your base salary, but they are taxed at the usual rate.
In case you were wondering, as we were, the backlog bonus is not for having the biggest NHS backlog on record. Rather it is for recognising “the sustained pressure facing the NHS following the pandemic and the extraordinary effort staff have been making to hit backlog recovery targets.” The NHS are hitting backlog recovery targets?
These increases apply to all “Agenda for Change staff” (whatever that means). The exact number of employees has not been disclosed but, but the government has said it covers more than 1 million NHS staff in England. It does not apply to junior doctors, who are involved in their own separate pay dispute. Nor does it cover NHS staff in Wales and Scotland.
Although these one-off payments are labelled differently they are, to all intents and purposes, cost of living payments for the reasons mentioned above. Hence their inclusion here.
How much will the NHS pay awards cost?
This pay deal covers all NHS staff covered by Agenda for change pay rates.
Agenda for change (basic) pay rates from April 2023 range from £22,383 (for Band 2) up to £114,949 (for Band 9 with 5+ years’ experience). On top of this, employees can receive high costs area supplements of up to 20% of basic salary (for inner London, subject to a minimum annual payment of £5,132 and a maximum payment of £7,746).
According to the NHS, the mean annual basic pay per full time equivalent (FTE) in NHS Trusts and CCGs in England, was £36,322 in the 12 month period to the end of December 2022. So the non-consolidated award worth 2 per cent is equal to £36,322 * 0.02 = £726.
The NHS backlog bonus ranges from £1,250 to £1,600 for each of the pay bands. According to NHS Employers, the NHS backlog bonus is worth an additional 4 per cent of the Agenda for Change pay bill. Based on an average FTE basic salary of £36,322, this implies an average payment of £1,453. This fits neatly into that published range.
How many staff benefit from these NHS cost of living payments?
We know, from the Department of Health and Social Care that there were over 1.2 million full-time equivalent staff working in NHS trusts and clinical commissioning groups in England as at October 2022. This number has since grown.
We also know from government announcements that the pay award affects at least 1 million staff.
Finally, we know that this pay settlement does not cover junior doctors. According to the Nuffield Trust, we are told that there were around 75,000 full-time equivalent doctors in training roles (‘junior doctors’) in the NHS in England (including GP trainees) as of September 2022. An increase of 33% since September 2015, no less.
That suggests that the number of NHS England staff benefitting from this pay deal is in the range of 1 – 1.125 million. We will go for an uncontentious average of 1.0625 million.
As we are only concerned with one-off awards in this article, we can calculate this as follows. These one-off cost of living payment are of the order of (£726 + £1,453) * 1.0625 million = £2.315 billion.
List of firms making cost of living payments (S – V)
| Company | Cost of living payment | Employees benefiting | Total cost of payment | Payment Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Serco | £200 | 45,000 | £9 million | Aug 2022 |
| Due to the recent surge in inflation, the company said it will be distribute an additional £9m in in one-off payments to all "colleagues outside management grades". Based on a reported 45,000 staff who will get the payment, this works out at £200 each. | ||||
| Shell | £5,000 | 5,000 | £25 million | Not disclosed |
| Globally 82,000 employees will share a bonus pot of $500m which averages $6,000 per employee. Approximately, 5,000 staff will get it in the UK. According to Shell...“In recognition of the contribution our people have made to Shell’s strong operational performance against a recent challenging backdrop, our executive committee has decided to make a special recognition award of 8% of salary to all eligible staff across the world". |
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| Rolls Royce | £2,000 | 14,000 | £28 million | Aug 2022 |
| The payment, for junior management and shop floor staff, covers approximately 70% of the company's UK workforce. | ||||
| Taylor Wimpey | £1,000 | 5,400 | £5.4 million | In 6 monthly payments from Sep 2022 |
| The company is making a cost of living payment of up to £1,000 for employees receiving an annual salary of up to £70,000. This covers 90% of its workforce. Taylor Wimpey directly employs around 6,000 staff in the UK so this payment affects around 5,400 employees. |
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| TSB | £1,000 | 4,500 | £4.5 million | Oct 2022 / Feb 2023 |
| Around 4,500 TSB staff earning up to £35,000 will get a one-off £1,000 pay boost. The payment will be made in 2 £500 installments in Oct 2022 and Feb 2023. It covers around 76% of TSB's workforce. | ||||
| University of Manchester | £1,000 | 11,000 | £11 million | £500 in Nov 2022, £500 in Jan 2023 |
| All employees on grades 1-8 (earning up to £71,644 a year) will receive a cost-of-living payment of £1,000. Employees in grade 9 (salary above £71,644) receive a single £500 in Nov 2022. The Senior Leadership Team are excluded from the scheme. The University of Manchester has not disclosed how many employees will benefit from the payment. The University employs over 12,000 staff and we (energyscanner.com) estimate that most of them will qualify putting the cost of the scheme at over £10m. |
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| Virgin Media O2 | £1,400 | 9,000 | £12.6 million | £400 in Nov 2022, £400 in Jan 2023 and then 6 monthly payments of £100 / month until Jul 2023 |
| Employees earning a basic salary of less than £35,000 will receive a support allowance totalling £1,400 between Nov 2022 and Jul 2023. Vigin Media O2 has not disclosed the number of staff affected. We estimate this would be over half of their 18,000 employees costing at the company at least £12.5 millon. | ||||
| Virgin Money | £1,000 | 6,240 | £6 million | Aug 2022 |
| Employees earning less than £50,000 received a flat one-off £1,000 cost of living payment. This covered approximately 78% of the companiy's 8,000 employees. | ||||
| Sources: energyscanner.com; Unite, company websites, various news feeds |
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Companies making cost of living payments (W – Z)
| Company | Cost of living payment | Employees benefiting | Total cost of payment | Payment Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| West Brom Building Society | £1,200 | 430 | £0.5 million | 4 monthly installments from Oct 2022 to Jan 2023 |
| Applies to employees earning £35,000 or less per year; around 70% of the workforce. The payment will be made in 4 monthly installments of £300 / month from Oct 2022 to Jan 2023. | ||||
| Whitbread | £300 | 34,000 | £10 million | |
| The one-off payment of up to £300 applies to all eligible hourly paid Team Members (Whitbread jargon) and its customer contact centre employees at Whitbread’s Dunstable HQ. Overver 34,000 employees, 90% of the UK workforce qualify for the payment. The one-off payment is in addition to the 4% increase in basic pay from Nov 2022. This in turn follows on from earlier pay increases in Oct 2021 and Apr 2022. Collectivly the 3 pay increases have raised base rates of pay by 10% since Oct 2021. | ||||
| Wilkin Chapman LLP | £1,000 | 400 | £0.4 million | Not disclosed |
| The one-off payment seems to apply to all employees. | ||||
| Yorkshire Building Society | £1,200 | 3,300 | £4 million | Sep 2022 |
| The payment will be made to all employees excluding directors or chief officers. | ||||
| Sources: energyscanner.com; Unite, company websites, various news feeds |
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