If you’re using the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme to claim for employees’ wages, the steps you’ll need to take are:

1. Check if you can claim.
2. Check which employees you can put on furlough.
3. Steps to take before calculating your claim.
4. Calculate how much you should claim.
5. Claim for your employees’ wages online.
6. Report a payment in PAYE Real Time Information.

Before you can calculate how much you can claim from the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme you’ll need to work out your employees’ wages. To do this you must work out:

• the length of your claim period
• what you can include when calculating wages
• your employees’ usual hours and furloughed hours

Deciding the length of your claim period

Your claim period is made up of the days you are claiming a grant for. The start date of your first claim period is the date your first employee was furloughed.

Claim periods starting on or after 1 July 2020 must start and end within the same calendar month. All claim periods starting on or after 1 July 2020 must last at least seven days.

For claim periods starting on or after 1 July 2020, you can claim for a period of less than seven days if you’re claiming for the first few days or the last few days in a month. You can only claim for a period of fewer than 7 days if the period you are claiming for includes either the first or last day of the calendar month, and you have already claimed for the period ending immediately before it.

You should match your claim period to the dates you process your payroll, if you can. You can only make one claim for any period so you must include all your furloughed or flexibly furloughed employees in one claim even if you pay them at different times. If you make more than one claim, your subsequent claim cannot overlap with any other claim that you make. Where employees have been furloughed or flexibly furloughed continuously (or both), the claim periods must follow on from each other with no gaps in between the dates.

You can claim before, during or after you process your payroll as long as your claim is submitted by the relevant claim deadline. You cannot submit your claim more than 14 days before your claim period end date.

When making your claim:

• you do not have to wait until the end date of the claim period for a previous claim before making your next claim
• you can make your claim more than 14 days in advance of the pay date (for example, if you pay your employee in arrears).

When claiming for employees who are flexibly furloughed you should not claim until you are sure of the exact number of hours they will have worked during the claim period. This means that you should claim when you have certainty about the number of hours your employees are working during the claim period. If you claim in advance and your employee works for more hours than you have told us about, then you will have to pay some of the grant back to HMRC. If you make an error in your claim, you can find out how to correct it.

Payments will be made six working days after you make your claim.