Maintenance deducted from pay

What it means

Maintenance is a statutory duty of support, most often of a parent towards a child, its amount set by a court or by an agreement the court has approved. It reaches payroll when it has to be deducted straight from an employee’s pay.

The deduction arises in three ways: an enforcement order from a court executor, a court decision on deductions from wages, or an agreement on deductions with the employee’s consent. The order of deductions is set by the Labour Code and the list of priority claims by the Enforcement Code; maintenance is one of them and is satisfied ahead of the rest, whatever their own order.

Deducting maintenance changes nothing about the employee’s tax or levies. Gross pay, the tax advance and the assessment base are calculated regardless of the fact that part of the pay goes to the recipient. Maintenance is not a tax expense of the payer nor income of the employer; the employer is merely a conduit for the payment.

How it works in practice

It is computed from net pay, that is after payroll tax advances and contributions. The protected basic amount comes off first, the remainder is split into thirds and a priority claim reaches two of them; for a minor child the protected amount is lower.

The employer sends the deducted amount to the recipient or the executor itself and carries the deduction on the payslip. It has to tell the executor when an employee with deductions joins or leaves, or enforcement carries on against stale details.

In the month an employee receives an annual bonus, net pay rises and so does the deduction. Maintenance is calculated from the whole net pay paid for that month, not from the usual salary. Before paying one-off bonuses we therefore show an employee with deductions in advance what will actually be left, so the deductions come as no surprise.

What to watch out for

The mistake peculiar to maintenance is leaving the ordinary protected amount in place where the maintenance is for a minor child, so that too little comes off. Whatever the payer of wages ought to have deducted, the beneficiary can recover directly from the employer, so the company makes up the attachment of earnings out of its own money and gets it back from the employee only with difficulty.

An employee says he has agreed with his former partner and now pays her maintenance himself. A deduction ordered by a court or a bailiff cannot be stopped on a verbal claim, only on written instruction from whoever ordered it. Otherwise the employer itself is liable in the enforcement for the amounts not deducted.