u/Disastrous-End2094

I’ve just landed a new assignment and will be moving from my first interim role at £480/day PAYE, which I started six months ago, to a new role at £650/day through an umbrella company. I’m really pleased with the opportunity but I’m starting to wonder whether the pay rise is quite as good as I initially thought.

For context, my current client rate is actually £600/day, but after the agency takes its cut, I’m paid £480/day. I also accrue two days of annual leave per month, with additional leave accruing if I work more days.

The new role is £650/day, all-inclusive through an umbrella company. Both roles are remote-first, with very little office attendance, so the working arrangements are pretty much the same.

I’m an accountant so I understand the general tax side of things, but I’ve never worked through an umbrella before and am finding it difficult to work out what I should actually expect to take home. I’ve done a fair bit of reading, but there are a quite few things I’m still unclear on.

Holiday pay: My understanding is that I’m entitled to statutory holiday pay, but is this taken out of the £650 assignment rate or paid on top? Is it held back and paid when I take leave, or can it be included in my regular pay? I’m trying to understand whether I’ll be worse off when I take time off compared with my current arrangement.

Take home pay: I currently take home around £1,600 a week (Exc any student finance deductions) and the estimates I’m getting for the new role range from roughly £1,400 to £1,850, depending on the calculator and assumptions. I was hoping to get closer to £2k net a week, so perhaps I was being a bit optimistic! For those on similar rates, what are you actually taking home? I appreciate it depends on individual circumstances.

Umbrella companies: I’ve been advised to look at Giant or PayStream. Are these good options, or are there better companies worth considering? I’d rather keep fees down, but I also want a reputable, compliant provider with transparent deductions and decent customer service. Is there much difference between providers in practice, or are they broadly similar?

One of my main concerns is getting paid and reported correctly. With my current agency, I’ve had issues with my £5k student loan deductions to date not being credited to my Student Finance account and my salary apparently not being reported correctly by £4k between tax years to HMRC. It’s been a significant headache trying to get it resolved, so I’m keen to avoid going through the same thing again.

Is there anything specific I should look for when choosing an umbrella company to make sure PAYE, National Insurance and student loan deductions are processed and reported correctly?

If you’ve made a similar move from agency PAYE to an umbrella, I’d be really interested to hear how you found it, which providers you’d recommend and whether there’s anything you wish you’d known beforehand.

Thanks very much!

Need some advice please because I’m not getting to the bottom of it with my agency, and I’m worried I’m not going to get my money back.

I work for a local authority through an agency but they have nothing to do with payroll - the agency handles all pay through approved timesheets. All timesheets were submitted and approved on time.

For my first 9 weekly pay periods, around £700-£800 income tax was deducted each week from my payslips. However, HMRC/Government Gateway only showed ONE of those weeks reported, that being the last week of the 9 week period…

Example of Wk9:
- Payslip:
- Gross: ~£2.4k
- Tax deducted: ~£818
- NI: ~£87
- HMRC / Gov Gateway for same week:
- Same gross
- Tax showing: ~£336
- Same NI

So the NI matches perfectly, but the income tax doesn’t.

HMRC also confirmed my employment start date was submitted around 2 months late, which explains why the earlier weeks are missing entirely from their system.

The agency keeps saying:
- my net pay is “correct”
- the missing amount belongs to HMRC, not me
- once they upload the historic weeks, everything will reconcile

But I cannot get a straight answer to the actual question:

If they deducted c.£818 from me, but HMRC only received/shows c.£336 for that week, where is the remaining c.£482 currently sitting?

What’s making me more uncomfortable is:
- all pay AFTER those first 9 weeks suddenly became correct
- HMRC and payslips now match exactly
- communication has been awful for nearly a month since raising this
- they aren’t being forthcoming with historic payslips, information or status updates
- HMRC told me they cannot refund money they never received

I’ve worked in finance/accounting for 8 years and every payroll I’ve ever had has matched Government Gateway penny for penny, which is why this feels so wrong to me.

I also understood it to be a legal requirement that what is reported to HMRC matches the payslip figures. So if the original payslips were wrong, surely they would need corrected payslips and corrected RTI submissions rather than just saying “it’ll reconcile later”?

At this point I’m convinced HMRC don’t owe me this money because they don’t actually have it. In addition to HMRC agreeing with me on the basis of the salary, calculations and information provided.

Has anyone dealt with something similar with PAYE/RTI/payroll corrections? Especially through agencies?

In my situation - please can you advise what I am best placed to do? Do you believe the money is with HMRC or the agency?

Thank you

Hi everyone - apologies in advance for the length of this post. I think I’ve just reached the point where it’s all built up and I’d really value hearing other people’s experiences.

I’ve recently been reading stories about Madelung deformity and it’s honestly started to make me feel a bit less alone. I was diagnosed at 21 and I’m now 28, I’ve still never met anyone else with it in real life and I find it really difficult to find useful information online.

What frustrates me most is that I repeatedly went to doctors from around age 7 all the way to 21. I had numerous X-rays over the years and health professionals would laugh at how odd my wrists looked or say they’d “never seen anything like it”. GPs always seemed perplexed by them, but despite me complaining about pain, weakness and discomfort for years, nothing was ever properly investigated.

Eventually my dad and I were researching together (as we regularly would) and came across Madelung deformity ourselves. I went back to the GP with this and finally got referred to a hand specialist about 60 miles away, who officially diagnosed me.

When I got diagnosed, I had various scans and testing done, including genetic testing, which showed mine is caused by a SHOX mutation. It also affects my height, which makes sense as I’m 4ft 11”.

One thing I found interesting was that my specialist sent me for a scan where they injected something radioactive into my hand/wrist to identify the source of the pain (sorry, I can’t remember the name of the scan). Apparently yellow indicates the source of pain and purple suggests the pain may not actually be coming from that area.

The confusing thing is that my scans come back purple, even though structurally my wrists are apparently quite severe. I have a large gap, compressed bones and a lot of overlapping in the joint, so the X-rays themselves look quite deformed according to the specialist.

He’s offered me ulna shortening surgery, but he’s also said he’s unsure whether it would actually resolve the pain because the scan doesn’t clearly point to that area as the source. So now I’m stuck trying to decide whether to go through what feels like quite major surgery when there’s no guarantee it’ll even help.

At the time I was diagnosed, the pain was more discomfort than anything severe. My wrists would ache, feel heavy, hurt if I knocked them, and driving would aggravate them. But over the years it’s progressively become much worse and now it genuinely impacts my day-to-day life.

Holding my baby nephew causes flare-ups for days afterwards. I get pain from holding my phone, typing on my phone or keyboard, writing with a pen, using cutlery etc. Sometimes it gets so painful I’m crying and just lying there with aching wrists and forearms.

I also have:
- Tingling fingers
- Numbness in my hands
- Poor grip strength
- Very muscular forearms where they’ve been overcompensating over the years

I take a fair amount of codeine for it now because ibuprofen and gels never really touched the sides.

Has anyone had any other treatments or medications that have helped manage pain and symptoms? I’d also really love to hear lived experiences from anyone who’s had surgery, especially ulna shortening, or anyone whose pain didn’t fully match what the scans showed.

Another thing I worry about is future children. I need to speak more to my geneticist about inheritance, but I’ve been told that if it’s identified young enough there are preventative options like growth hormone treatment. That’s another thing I find upsetting really, because if doctors had taken me seriously as a child, apparently there may have been interventions available.

I already deal with quite a few other chronic health conditions too: POTS, severe endometriosis, asthma and gastro issues. Although I try really hard to stay active, my wrists do get me down. Yoga and Pilates can be difficult, despite me loving them, because so much weight goes through the wrists. If I modify onto my forearms instead, being really short throws my balance off and somehow makes the exercises feel 10x harder.

Interestingly though, when I saw a physio a few years ago after starting reformer Pilates, he was actually amazed by how much my wrist mobility and grip strength had improved.

My left wrist (the worst one) would be done first and then my right later on, but the surgery worries me because I’d probably be out of action for around 2 months and I’m not ambidextrous. I’m also self-employed in the UK, so sick pay is basically nothing compared to my income. I’m getting married in 18 months too, and recovery sounds pretty intrusive.

At the same time though, part of me thinks now is probably the best time to do it before having children, because I genuinely worry about how I’d cope caring for a baby knowing how much holding them and caring for them would exacerbate the pain.

Would really appreciate hearing anyone’s experiences, thoughts on surgery, pain management, or just how this condition affects your everyday life. Sorry again for the length - this it would be really nice to hear from anyone who relates to any of this. Thank you