Apprentice pay and the law: what you must be paid, and what to do if you aren’t

Rules and figures checked: 2026-07-25. Funding, tenancy and tax rules move — verify before relying on them.

There is a specific date on which a large number of apprentices in this country get a pay rise they never receive, because nobody in the payroll system notices it has arrived.

It's the day you finish your first year, if you're 19 or over. On that day the apprentice minimum wage stops applying to you and the ordinary age-related rate takes over. On £8.00 an hour going to £10.85, that's a jump of over a third. Nothing automatic makes it happen. It is supposed to be caught by your employer, and it routinely isn't.

This article is the legal floor and the enforcement route. What degree apprentices actually get paid in practice — which for most large employers is comfortably above any of these numbers — is a separate article. This one is for when the number on your payslip is wrong.

I'll say up front that I was never underpaid, and that on a Level 6 programme at a large employer you're less exposed than most apprentices, because a £22,000-ish starting salary sits far above the minimum and payroll departments at that scale are generally competent. But "less exposed" isn't "not exposed", and the failure modes below hit degree apprentices too — particularly the ones about unpaid training and travel time.

The rates, and the rule people get wrong

From 1 April 2026 the National Minimum Wage rates are:

The apprentice rate applies if you are either aged under 19, or aged 19 or over and in the first year of your apprenticeship.

Read that as two conditions, because the mistake everyone makes is treating it as one. You move onto the ordinary age-related rate the moment you are both 19 or over and past the first year of your apprenticeship. Not when you turn 19. Not when you turn 21. When both are true.

Two worked cases, because this is where the money goes missing.

Started at 18, birthday in March. You turn 19 during your first year, and nothing changes — you're 19 but still in year one, so the apprentice rate still applies. Then your first year ends in September. From that day you're entitled to at least £10.85, not £8.00. That is the moment nobody flags.

Started at 21. You're on the apprentice rate for year one only. From year two you're entitled to at least £12.71 — a rise of nearly 60%. On a four-year programme, an employer who quietly leaves an apprentice on the apprentice rate for the duration is underpaying by a very large amount, and it happens.

Worth stating the obvious once: these are floors, not going rates. If you're being offered £8.00 an hour for a Level 6 degree apprenticeship at a large employer, the problem isn't legality.

Your training time is working time, and must be paid

This is the biggest single cause of apprentice underpayment, and it's usually not malice — it's a genuine misunderstanding on the employer's part.

Time you spend training as part of your apprenticeship counts as working time for minimum wage purposes and has to be paid. A day at university, a training session, the hours you're released for study — all of it is paid time. The Low Pay Commission has flagged this specifically: when it looked at apprentice underpayment in May 2020 it found roughly one in five apprentices earning less than their legal entitlement, and identified confusion about paying for training hours as likely accounting for a large share of it.

So the arrangements to look at hard:

• Being asked to make up your study day. If your contracted week is 37.5 hours and one day is training, you are not expected to work 37.5 hours plus the training. If you're routinely doing that, the hours are real, and the "20% off-the-job" framing exists precisely to stop it. See off-the-job training hours.
• Unpaid time at residentials. A week living on a campus is unusual, but the teaching hours in it are working hours. Compressed weeks are where people quietly rack up unpaid time.
• Travel to training. Travel between workplaces, or to a training venue that isn't your normal place of work, is generally working time. Ordinary home-to-work commuting isn't.
• Deductions. Anything your employer deducts for its own benefit — some uniform and equipment arrangements, for example — can push your effective hourly rate below the minimum, which makes the deduction unlawful even where the headline salary was fine.

The check that catches all of it: take what you were actually paid in a pay period, divide by the hours you actually worked including training, and compare to the rate for your age and year. If it comes out under, something's wrong, whatever the contract says.

Do the sum before you do anything else

Salaried people rarely check their hourly rate, which is exactly why the errors survive.

You'll need your contracted hours, your actual hours including training and any regular unpaid extra, your gross pay for the period, and your start date. Annual salary divided by 52, divided by weekly hours, gets you close enough to spot a problem. £22,000 over 37.5 hours is about £11.28 an hour — fine at 18 to 20, and under the £12.71 floor once you're 21 and past year one. That's not a hypothetical: it's an ordinary degree apprenticeship salary meeting an ordinary birthday, and it's the kind of thing that gets missed at employers who set the salary once and never revisit it.

Keep payslips. Keep the contract. Keep anything that records your hours.

Raising it

Start with payroll or HR, not a confrontation. Genuinely — most of these are errors, and an email that says "I finished my first year on 6 September and I think I should have moved onto the 18-to-20 rate then; could you check?" gets it fixed within a pay cycle in the overwhelming majority of cases. Back pay is normal and expected. You are not accusing anyone of anything.

If that doesn't work, get advice before escalating. The Acas helpline on 0300 123 1100 is free and confidential, and the people on it deal with this daily. Citizens Advice has a good written guide. If you're in a union, this is what it's for.

Then report it to HMRC. This is the part that surprises people: it's not a tribunal, it's an enforcement body, and the complaint is anonymous. Your details are not shared with your employer. You can report even if you've left. Someone else — a parent, a friend, a colleague — can report on your behalf. The government's Check Your Pay campaign has the form and a section specifically for apprentices.

What HMRC can do, once it finds underpayment: issue a notice to pay what's owed going back up to six years, fine the employer up to £20,000 with a minimum of £100 per affected worker, refer the employer for naming, and in serious cases pursue criminal proceedings. It is a genuinely effective route, and it's free.

The reason to know it's anonymous is that the fear of retaliation is what stops most people, and here that fear is largely misplaced. Retaliating against you for asserting a statutory right is separately unlawful in any case.

The bit where I temper this

Most apprentices are paid correctly. Most employers who get it wrong got it wrong by accident. And an apprentice who arrives at week three quoting enforcement penalties over a payroll error is going to have a worse four years than one who sends a polite email.

The sequence that works is boring and effective: check the sum, ask payroll, give them a pay cycle to fix it, escalate if they don't. Almost everything is resolved at step two.

But do check. The specific reason apprentice underpayment persists is that the people affected are eighteen, new to work, unsure what they're entitled to, and disinclined to make trouble in their first proper job. That's not a character flaw — it's a completely rational response to being the most junior person in the building. It's also precisely why the errors go unnoticed for years.

The one-line version

You move off the apprentice rate the day you are both 19 or over and past your first year — nothing does that automatically, so check it yourself. All training time is paid time. And if it's wrong, HMRC takes anonymous reports and can claw back six years.

For what the numbers actually look like once you're past the legal floor, see what degree apprentices actually earn and a real monthly budget.