Employee and employer salary sacrifice contributions

FOI reference: FOI-2025-2547

You asked

I understand you collect statistics on salary sacrifice via your ASHE survey.

I am interested in exploring data relating to tax relief on employee and employer salary sacrifice contributions.

Looking at the last annual ASHE data, could you help me with the following questions:

1. How many employees nationally do you estimate availed of the salary sacrifice based on your ASHE survey?
2. What was the average relief per salary sacrificing employee?
3. How many employers nationally do you estimate availed of salary sacrifice relief based on your ASHE survey?
4. What was the average relief per salary sacrificing employer?
5. Is it possible to provide a bracketed breakdown of salary sacrifice relief per employee.
6. I believe that in order to understand the top range, I am permitted by your disclosure rules to have a £ average of either the Top 10/Top 20/Top 30 or Top 40 employees (by size of relief claimed). Can you please supply a figure for one of these datapoints which is within your disclosure rules?
7. Is it possible to provide a bracketed breakdown of salary sacrifice relief per employer?
8. Finally, may I also have a £ average of either the Top 10/Top 20/Top 30 or Top 40 employers (by size of relief claimed)?

Can you provide any links to other datasets you publish on salary sacrifice please? I find it hard to navigate your ASHE data online, and it would be good to have a user-friendly roadmap as to where exactly your salary sacrifice excel sheets, statistics and publications are.

We said

Thank you for your Freedom of Information request regarding data relating to tax relief on employee and employer salary sacrifice contributions.

The Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE), carried out in April each year, is the most comprehensive source of earnings information in the United Kingdom. ASHE is based on a 1% sample of employee jobs taken from HM Revenue and Customs' Pay As You Earn (PAYE) records.

Unfortunately, we do not hold the information you have requested. 

While a variable on salary sacrifice is collected as part of the ASHE, we do not process this data to produce the requested information. Therefore, to provide this in response to your request, we would need to create new information. ICO guidance states that information is not held, as defined by the Act, if it would need to be created and that FOIA only applies to information already held in a recorded form. This information therefore is not held.

To provide some further context, we have identified that the creation of the requested information would involve:

1. Cleaning and validating the data collected to remove erroneous values from responses. This will require validation methods to be developed by skilled survey methodologists to identify suspicious cases and such cases being investigated manually by re-contacting the responding business.
2. The data would then need to be aggregated and be appraised by skilled statisticians to identify whether it is disclosive and/or whether it is of sufficient quality to be released
3. As the data is not currently produced, our data processing systems will require changes beyond amendments to our data extraction and data querying tools.

These actions would all require the application of statistical expertise and experience, involving skill and judgement, to produce new information.

Regarding your questions about how many employees and employers nationally we would estimate availed of the salary sacrifice based on our ASHE survey, this information is not held and we would also caution users against using ASHE for counts of employees and employers in general.

Regarding your last question about where to find salary sacrifice excel sheets, statistics and publications in our website, unfortunately, ONS does not produce information on this.