And no, this is no April fool…

Over 2 million people will get a pay rise from 1 April 2018 thanks to an above-inflation rise in the National Living Wage (NLW).

The National Living Wage will go up by 4.4%, from £7.50 to £7.83, meaning a full-time minimum wage worker will be over £2,000 better off since the introduction of the National

Living Wage in April 2016. From April 2018, the tax-free personal allowance will also increase from £11,500 to £11,850.

Almost 400,000 young workers are expected to benefit from the increases in the National Minimum Wage.

From 1 April 2018 the rates for:

  • workers aged 25 and over will be £7.83 per hour
  • workers aged 21 to 24 will be £7.38 per hour
  • workers aged 18 to 20 will be £5.90 per hour
  • workers aged under 18 will be £4.20 per hour
  • apprentices under 19 or in the first year of their apprenticeship will be £3.70 per hour

Employers who underpay minimum wage rates can face fines of up to 200% of the back pay they owe to workers and can be publicly named by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

Since 2013 the naming scheme has identified more than £9 million in back pay for around 67,000 workers, with more than 1,700 employers fined a total of £6.3 million. Since 2015, the government has doubled investment in minimum wage enforcement, spending £25.3 million in 2017 to 2018.

The uplift comes after the government published its Good Work plan in February, which announced the right to a payslip for all workers. The new law is likely to benefit around 300,000 people who do not currently get a payslip.

For those paid by the hour, payslips will also have to include how many hours the worker is paid for, making pay easier to understand and challenge if it is wrong. The move is part of the government’s Industrial Strategy.