Workplace Nursery Scheme: Benefits for Employers

How the workplace nursery benefit can help your business:

  • By offering your employees the option of taking the Workplace Nursery Scheme the company are fully supporting employees in their return to work decision

  • This helps to alleviate some of the stresses that working parents experience with regards to childcare arrangements

  • Employers typically save money

  • Employees save money

  • Allows working parents more opportunity to work

  • Help local nurseries benefit from enhanced funding, resources, management and other benefits from partnering with local businesses

Staff Retention

Helps you retain staff, their experience and talents at no extra cost to the business.

Attract the best

Helps attract high calibre new staff.

Return to work

Makes the return to work decision easier for all new parents.

Happy Staff

Improves employees work/life balance.

WNP Saving Example:

For example, if you were paying nursery fees of

£1,200 a month you could save:

basic rate tax payer
£0
Saving per year
Higher rate tax payer
£0
Saving per year

Savings possible for your employees with workplace nursery benefit

The Workplace nursery benefit allows far greater levels of saving than were possible with the childcare voucher benefit, or are possible with the governments new tax free childcare scheme. For a parent paying basic rate tax with nursery fees of £1300 a month, the workplace nursery benefit will save them £3666 a year. For higher rate tax payers, the advantages of workplace are even more pronounced, with nursery fees of £1300 a month, they will save £5421 a year.

Monthly Saving Examples

Monthly childcare costs Saving with Workplace Nursery benefit for Basic rate taxpayer Saving with Workplace Nursery benefit for Higher rate taxpayer
£800 £1,824 £3,336
£1,000 £2,280 £4,170
£1,200 £2,736 £5,004
£1,500 £3,420 £6,255
£1,700 £3,876 £7,089
£2,000 £4,560 £8,340
Monthly Childcare Costs Saving With Workplace Nursery Benefit For Basic Rate Taxpayer Saving With Workplace Nursery Benefit For Higher Rate Taxpayer
£800 £1,824 £3,336
£1,000 £2,280 £4,170
£1,200 £2,736 £5,004
£1,500 £3,420 £6,255
£1,700 £3,876 £7,089
£2,000 £4,560 £8,340

How much your business saves

WNP Employer Overview

If you need anymore advice please get in-touch with us

The Workplace Nursery Benefit allows your business to work in partnership with a chosen nursery, or nurseries that are then used by your employees. This enables your employees to save Tax and National Insurance payments on ALL of
their nursery fees from birth up to the age of 5 (or when the child goes to school). This benefit is worth thousands of pounds in savings each year to an employee.
Run by us on your behalf, this benefit enables your employees to use a nursery that works best for them in terms of style, location and cost.
The cost of the benefit is taken out of their gross salary.
By offering your employees access to the Workplace Nursery Benefit, you are also helping employees with their return to work decision.

Parents typically pay for childcare from the birth of their child up to around the age of 12 years old. Childcare costs are heavily loaded with the early years from birth to 5 years being the most expensive.
Most parents will choose to use a nursery for the care of their child when they return to work but they quickly discover that the cost of care is often more than their mortgage or monthly rent. The average cost of nursery fees in the UK is now around £1000 a month but in London the monthly cost is much higher at around £1300 – £1700 a month.
As such, this cost will heavily influence a new parents return to work decision, adding to the emotion of leaving a baby in the care of someone else.

The workplace nursery benefit provides significant savings for an employee at no cost to the business. In order to be in line with the HMRC guidance however, the benefit requires the following documented actions:
• There must be a contribution by the employer towards the running and upkeep of the nursery.

• This is £1200 a year which is paid to the nursery at £100 a month. (This is paid for out of the employers National Insurance savings).

• The nursery contribution from the employer to the partnered nursery, must be used towards the running and upkeep of the nursery setting.

Your employee, acting as a representative of the company must attend a meeting with the nursery which will be arranged and managed by Enjoy Benefits. This meeting must take place within 6 weeks of the contract going live. We discuss the plans for the nursery for the period of the contract and agree how the monies from the company can be used to best effect.Further meetings and consultations between the employee, acting as your representative, and the nursery, again conducted by Enjoy Benefits will continue for the duration of the contract to ensure the nursery gets the maximum benefit from the resources you can provide, including the funding and to also offer management insight to the nursery to help them attain their longer term ambitions. Your employee is specifically not going to be involved the day-to-day running of the nursery.
• Copies of receipts from this agreed spending are obtained by Enjoy Benefits and sent to the company for their records.

As nursery costs can be high, you must ensure that any employee choosing the benefit, won’t drop below minimum wage as a result of the monthly deduction. If this was to be the case the employee wouldn’t be able to access the benefit using salary sacrifice. The scheme must be open to all of your staff.

Invoices are issued to you on either the 1st or 12th of the month for employee deductions and we must have cleared payment of this invoice by the 20th of the month. This then allows us to send monies to your chosen nurseries for the 1st of the month following. Direct Debit is the preferred payment method for this benefit.

The nursery must be able to factor the nursery contribution into their planning and budgeting, whether the child stays at the nursery or not. Should an employee wish to stop using the benefit before the stated end of the contract, the nursery contribution must continue to be paid. To accommodate this, we will set the nursery fees to zero and we will continue to invoice the company for the additional £100 nursery contribution until the end of the contract.

Prior to implementing the Workplace Nursery Benefit, we recommend that you amend your policy documents to advise employees on how you will operate this benefit with regards redundancy, employees moving nurseries or leaving the company etc.

If you have a company mission statement that will influence how the nursery contribution is spent, we can add this to the notes and preferences we hold for you. As an example, if the company is committed to reducing plastic use and recycling, you can stipulate that the contribution should only be used to purchase items that are not plastic based or be put towards environmentally positive projects.

As you will be working in partnership with chosen nurseries, we would ask that you look at ways the business can enhance these
relationships. This can include:

Adding each nursery to your Corporate and Social Responsibility programme.

On the initial meeting calls with your employees and the nurseries, we will ask if there are any resources that the business can provide in addition to the finance. Some examples include old phones or keyboards for the children to play with in the nursery “home corner”, trade magazines for the children to cut up to develop fine motor skills, old point of sale material etc.

You may allow employees to participate in volunteering days. If so, your employees could choose to help at the nurseries with projects such as a garden re-vamps, day trips out of the nursery etc.

If you have a product or service that is nursery appropriate, the business can choose to donate to the nursery. Examples of where this has happened include the provision of old hard hats from a building company, a pizza company giving ingredients for regular pizza days and clients involved in landscaping offering help both with labour and plants.

Workplace Nursery Provision

A network of nurseries

We work with nurseries across the UK and are adding new ones all the time.

We have a network of nurseries that we currently work with to offer this benefit to companies and this list grows daily. If a parent would like to use a nursery that we don’t currently partner with, we will contact them to discuss how the benefit can help them and their nursery parents.

  • Enhances employee retention rates
  • This is a great way to attract the best candidates

  • This saves your employees money and the company

  • As an employer supported benefit, this helps to set you apart from your competitors

  • Workplace nurseries are a great way to show your employees that they are valued and, in turn, help you to retain highly skilled members of your workforce.

Why choose us as your Workplace Nursery Provider?

We have been offering this benefit since 2004. Our web-based employee benefits service is easy for you and your employees to access and any queries are typically answered within one working day, meaning fast resolutions for busy workforces.
You will have a named account manager on hand to ensure your scheme is the perfect fit for your organisation and people.

Employers feedback

I personally have found the Workplace nursery scheme easy to set up and I know my nursery are really pleased we are going down this route and my boss I happy to be getting a saving too so it is definitely a win all round!….. I cannot recommend the scheme enough and as the person in charge of HR and the benefits within my organisation. It would definitely be the route I would recommend, should the need come up for a colleague in the future.

Ms. Thomas, Employer and parent
Work Place Nursery is a superb benefit to both employer and employee. We manage our scheme via Enjoy Benefits and I highly recommend them. I see the scheme from both sides of the administration, as an employer and an employee with two children in nursery. The initial paperwork is easy to set-up and the office support from Enjoy Benefits is very efficient. Meeting the Enjoy Benefits co-ordinator at the nursery is always a pleasure and they have always been equally efficient and responsive.
I’m delighted to use the scheme via Enjoy Benefits and share the benefits it affords to the company I work for and the colleagues I work with.
Mrs Forster, Parent and employer, Westminster
I’ve really had a very good saving with the workplace benefits and I’m really happy I have been told about these benefits by my company and by workplace benefits team.

It’s not only me who benefits of that, but is also, the nursery, the £100 they get every month I’m sure this is helpful to buy more toys and develop staff skills, etc.

For the money I have saved, all will go to my son account to make sure when he will grow he will be able to go to a good school.

I have talked about the workplace benefits to everyone I know, to make sure others families can save as well some of the nursery costs, as in UK these are very high comparing others countries.

Simona Aldea , Akwell Automotives
Setting up my agreement with Enjoy Benefits for my daughter’s nursery fees was quick and easy and it has benefitted both my family and the nursery financially to quite considerable sums. As a family, we’ve saved £1400 in six months which has been a huge help. To think we’ll be almost £3,000 better off at the end of 12 months is staggering. My daughter’s nursery has used the money it received to improve its garden area. It’s a winning situation all round.
Claire Sanderson, Editor-in-Chief, Women’s Health and mum to two-year-old Nell
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need help?
get in touch

Queries are dealt with within 1 working day.

Contact Form

Send a Mesage

talk to our team

0800 088 7315