Named and shamed: what 12 years of minimum wage naming reveals

A supermarket uniform charged to your wages. A kitchen close that runs past clocking-out time. Travel between care visits that never reaches the payslip. Each can leave you below the minimum wage, even when the hourly rate looks right. Across 24 government naming rounds since 2014, we counted £66.9 million in arrears. The money was earned before it was recovered. The published names tell us which cases reached enforcement, not whose pay is lawful today.

What to do today

You do not need to wait for your employer to be named. Waiting can cost you a claim deadline.

1. Search the name that pays you. Use our searchable record of the 24 official lists. If an agency pays you, search it as well as the workplace. Absence from the list proves nothing about your wages.
2. Check one pay period. For hourly-paid work, divide pay that counts by all hours that count in the week or month. The pay reference period cannot exceed a month. From the first pay period starting on or after 1 April 2026, the floor is £12.71 if you are 21 or over and not on the apprentice rate. Our underpayment guide explains deductions and the different hours calculation for salaried work. Include closing time and travel between clients.
3. Keep the evidence. Save payslips, rotas, messages about required charges and your own record of actual start and finish times. Keep them somewhere you can access after leaving. Do not copy patients’ or clients’ records.
4. Ask in writing, if it is safe. State the pay period, counted hours, counted pay and shortfall. Ask for the missing pay and a corrected calculation. If you fear losing shifts or your employer sponsors your visa, speak to a union or adviser first. You can report without confronting a manager.
5. Choose the enforcement route with advice. Use the pay and work rights complaint form. HMRC enforces the minimum wage for the Fair Work Agency. Tell HMRC if you do not want it to identify you to the employer, but the circumstances might still reveal who complained. You can report a former employer. GOV.UK says HMRC cannot take the complaint forward if you have already started tribunal action for the minimum wage issue.
6. Protect the tribunal deadline. In Great Britain, an incorrect payment on or after 1 October 2026 usually gives you six months minus one day. For an incorrect payment before that date, the usual limit remains three months minus one day. Notify Acas within the applicable limit for early conciliation, which pauses it. An HMRC complaint or workplace grievance does not substitute for notifying Acas. Get advice on your exact deadline, especially for a series of short payments. In Northern Ireland, contact the Labour Relations Agency.

The rates are the same in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Accommodation is the only benefit in kind that can count. The employer-provided accommodation offset is £11.10 a day from 1 April 2026. Charges above it reduce minimum-wage pay. See the rates guide for birthdays, apprentices and how the offset works.

For union help, retail workers can try Usdaw. Unite and GMB organise in hospitality, security and warehouses. Care and NHS support workers can try UNISON or GMB. Cleaners can also ask the IWGB. If the dispute has already started, check what a new membership covers. In Great Britain, Acas gives free advice on 0300 123 1100, Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm. In Northern Ireland, use the Labour Relations Agency. You can also seek help from Citizens Advice, a law centre or the Work Rights Centre, particularly if your immigration position makes challenging the employer risky.

What a name actually means

Employees, zero-hours staff, casual staff, apprentices and agency workers are owed the rate. Genuinely self-employed people are not. A contract that says self-employed does not decide it. If you are told when to be there and must do the work yourself, read fake self-employment. Where an agency pays you, that agency is normally responsible. Agency rights include the minimum wage from day one.

The current enforcement policy considers employers for naming where total arrears are £500 or more. A lower threshold of more than £100 applies to specified repeat cases, including an employer issued another notice of underpayment in the previous six years. It also applies where there is a qualifying outstanding enforcement order or undertaking, or an unspent minimum-wage conviction. The 2020 relaunch raised the usual threshold from £100 to £500. Small arrears still have to be repaid.

Qualifying for naming does not guarantee publication. There are limited exemptions, including risks of personal harm or national security. Certain consented salary-sacrifice or deduction schemes can also qualify for a waiver of the penalty and naming, under strict conditions. Required uniform charges and other employment expenses do not qualify for that waiver.

We counted 5,277 listings, not 5,277 separate firms. Fifty-six names appear in more than one round after matching without regard to capital letters. That does not establish 56 repeat offenders. A name match is not a legal-entity check, and an employer can be named for separate notices. The 654,277 worker entries are also a sum across listings, not a count of different people. Your own missing hours might never have been investigated.

How the pay goes missing

The hourly rate printed on a payslip is not enough. Minimum-wage pay and counted working hours determine whether you received the legal floor.

Charges for required uniforms or tools reduce the pay that counts. Required training, closing work, security checks and travel between care visits can add unpaid hours. Salary sacrifice reduces minimum-wage pay too, even when you receive the agreed benefit. A missed April increase or an incorrect apprentice rate can leave you short without any change to your hours.

In naming rounds 17 to 20, published between August 2021 and February 2024, deductions and unpaid working time each appeared in more than one in three cases, according to the Low Pay Commission. The cases themselves covered earlier periods too. The published causes describe those rounds; our combined dataset does not record a cause for each employer.

The Low Pay Commission found that social care had the largest rise in underpayment as a share of minimum-wage coverage among low-paying sectors between 2019 and 2024. It warned that unpaid travel between home-care visits is likely to be largely invisible in employers’ earnings records. The naming table below cannot measure that wider problem. Our care pay guide covers travel and sleep-ins. For a genuine sleep-in with suitable sleeping facilities, only time awake for the purpose of working counts. A waking night is different.

The £8.00 apprentice rate applies to apprentices under 19, or those aged 19 or over in their first year. A 20-year-old in year two paid £8.00 instead of £10.85 is short £2.85 an hour, or £106.88 for a 37.5-hour week, rounded. See apprentice rights. Trial shifts require a separate assessment. A short, genuinely observed recruitment test may be unpaid; using a trial worker to cover a warehouse shift can create entitlement to the minimum wage. Our trial-shifts guide explains the distinction. Tips never count towards the minimum wage, even when you receive them through payroll. See tips and service charges.

Twelve years, and a two-year hole

We compiled the 24 official naming lists on 8 October 2026, using government spreadsheets and press releases. The first round in our dataset is 28 February 2014; the last is 3 September 2026. Employer counts match each release’s headline. Total recorded arrears are £66,919,762, rounded to the nearest pound. This is our combined analysis, not a government estimate of all underpayment.

Naming paused after July 2018 while the scheme was reviewed. The government announced revised rules in February 2020, and publication resumed on 31 December 2020. The pause and higher usual threshold complicate comparisons. A bigger later round can reflect accumulated investigations or larger cases. It cannot, by itself, tell us whether underpayment became more common.

The 15 rounds up to 6 July 2018 contain 1,957 listings and £10,778,446 in arrears. The nine rounds from 31 December 2020 contain 3,320 listings and £56,141,317. On 20 February 2024 alone, £15,805,622 and 172,199 worker entries exceeded the totals of every pre-pause round combined. There was another gap between December 2021 and June 2023. No publication does not mean no underpayment.

The 3 September 2026 round was the first published under the Fair Work Agency, established on 7 April 2026. Its 658 listings were the most in any round, with £4,246,022 in arrears and 27,617 worker entries. It had more names than February 2024 but much less money. Neither comparison establishes whether the new agency is more effective.

Who gets named

Sector labels were recorded from February 2017, but the lists use inconsistent names and capitalisation. The table preserves the main recorded label for each of these sectors. It does not combine every matching category. Arrears are rounded to the nearest pound; counts are listings and worker entries.

Hospitality has the most listings under a single sector label. Retail accounts for about one in eight employer listings, but more than a third of all worker entries. A salon and a superstore each occupy one line. Counting names alone hides the number of people affected.

The labels split similar work. Combining “Social care” with “Social Care” gives 203 listings and £1,806,826 in arrears. Two domiciliary-care and childcare labels add 15 listings, £191,482 and 3,747 worker entries. Cleaning appears under two further labels, with 30 listings and £88,188, and 27 listings and £45,575. Hair and beauty adds 109 listings, £333,633 and 433 worker entries beyond the hairdressing row.

The two employment-agency labels together contain 83 listings, £7,926,001 and 79,105 worker entries. Staffline’s February 2024 listing accounts for more than half that money. “Non low-paying/other” contains 749 listings and £11,284,358. The main food-processing label records 80 listings and £3,381,595. Another 953 pre-2017 listings have no recorded sector, accounting for £6,966,267 and 55,103 worker entries. We cannot use this table to rank the risk of being underpaid in each industry.

The biggest underpayment listings

Staffline and Tesco head the dataset, each with more than £5 million in arrears. The table shows the largest single listings, not combined group liabilities or the biggest cases ever investigated. It does not tell us what caused a particular employer’s breach.

Other familiar names appear just below the table. Euro Garages was named on 17 October 2025 for £824,383.62 affecting 3,317 workers. PizzaExpress was named on 29 May 2025 for £760,701.61 affecting 8,470. ISS Facility Services’ £754,760.14 and 5,378 workers are a separate March 2026 listing from ISS Mediclean. Marks and Spencer was named on 21 June 2023 for £578,390.79 affecting 5,363 workers.

The average shortfall in a large case can look small beside the headline. Tesco’s December 2020 listing works out at £65.18 per worker. Mitchells & Butlers’ February 2024 listing was £565,094.87 across 16,187 workers, averaging £34.91. B&Q’s September 2026 listing was £456,934.72 across 4,530 workers, averaging £100.87. These are averages over the periods investigated, not weekly or annual losses, and individual amounts differed. Across all listings, the averages are about £102 per worker entry and £12,681 per employer listing.

A household name can be £35 short, per person, and still be hundreds of thousands of pounds. That money had already been earned.

The penalty, and the money you get

You receive the arrears, not the penalty. For pay periods starting on or after 1 April 2016 the penalty is 200% of the arrears, at least £100 and at most £20,000 per worker. It halves if the employer pays the arrears and half the penalty within 14 days. The arrears are due within 28 days of the notice.

Older arrears are uplifted when the current rate is higher. Divide the original shortfall by the rate that applied then and multiply by the current rate for the same age band that applied then. For example, a worker aged 25 in 2023/24 who went unpaid for 100 hours was owed 100 × £10.42 = £1,042. Calculated at the October 2026 adult rate, that becomes £1,042 ÷ £10.42 × £12.71 = £1,271. This is not the formula for someone who was only £1 an hour short. Use the actual missing pay, not the total hours alone.

Wilful refusal to pay, falsified records and obstruction can be criminal offences. Breaching a labour market enforcement order can carry up to two years in prison. A criminal prosecution is separate from the civil process for recovering arrears. You do not need a conviction to be owed the money.

There are other ways to set wage floors. Norway has no statutory national minimum wage, but makes certain sectoral collective agreements legally binding, including in cleaning and hospitality. The Norwegian Labour Inspection Authority explains those enforceable rates. This is a different mechanism, not evidence from our dataset that one country’s enforcement works better.

Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland

The minimum-wage rates and HMRC enforcement route are UK-wide. Northern Ireland employers appear on the same lists, including Peninsula Care Services (NI) in September 2026. For advice and tribunal conciliation there, use the Labour Relations Agency, not Acas. Do not apply Great Britain’s new deadline to a Northern Ireland claim. See our Northern Ireland guide.

Agricultural workers in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have separate pay regimes that can require more than the UK minimum. The national rate remains the floor. In Scotland, the tribunal time-limit change for breach-of-contract claims is scheduled for 9 November 2026, rather than 1 October. Before that date, the usual contract-claim limit remains three months minus one day. This exception is about the type of claim, not a lower Scottish minimum wage.

What is in force, and what is not

1. 28 Feb 2014First round in our dataset

   Five employers, £6,866 in arrears and six worker entries.

2. 1 Apr 2016Penalty rises to 200%

   The higher penalty applies to pay reference periods starting on or after this date.

3. 6 Jul 2018Last naming round before the pause

   Publication stops during the scheme review.

4. 11 Feb 2020Revised naming rules announced

   The usual threshold rises from £100 to £500. Smaller arrears remain payable; the current policy includes exceptions.

5. 31 Dec 2020Naming resumes

   The first post-pause round includes Tesco.

6. 1 Apr 2026Current minimum-wage rates

   £12.71 for eligible workers aged 21 or over, £10.85 for ages 18 to 20 and £8.00 for the younger and apprentice bands.

7. 7 Apr 2026Fair Work Agency established

   In force. HMRC officers enforce the minimum wage on its behalf.

8. 3 Sep 2026Largest round by employer listings

   The first Fair Work Agency round contains 658 listings.

9. 1 Oct 2026Great Britain’s longer tribunal limit starts

   Usually six months minus one day for problems occurring on or after this date. Earlier problems retain their earlier deadlines. Scotland’s breach-of-contract change is scheduled for 9 November.

Questions people ask

Where can I search employers named for minimum-wage underpayment?

Search our combined dataset of 24 official rounds from 28 February 2014 to 3 September 2026. It contains 5,277 employer listings. Search trading and legal names where you know both, including the agency that pays you.

How does an employer get onto the naming list?

HMRC investigates, identifies arrears and refers closed cases for naming. The usual threshold is £500 or more, with a lower threshold above £100 for specified repeat cases. Limited exemptions apply. The published arrears have been repaid; naming is not a criminal conviction.

What is the biggest minimum-wage underpayment case?

The largest single listing in our dataset is Staffline Recruitment Limited, named on 20 February 2024 for £5,125,270.93 affecting 36,767 workers. Tesco’s December 2020 listing is next at £5,096,946.13. This does not establish the largest case ever, including cases that were not named.

Does being named prove deliberate or continuing underpayment?

No. It records a past underpayment that HMRC identified and the employer repaid. It does not establish intention or describe current pay. Equally, absence from the list is not evidence that your employer pays lawfully.

Which sectors underpay most?

The dataset cannot answer that. Hospitality has the most listings under one recorded label, with 975. Retail has the most recorded arrears and worker entries. Different sector sizes, inconsistent labels, unrecorded sectors and undetected underpayment prevent a reliable ranking of risk.

Can I report without my employer knowing, and will I get paid?

Tell HMRC on the complaint form if you do not want your identity disclosed. Your employer might still guess. Reporting does not guarantee an investigation or recovery, but arrears identified as owed belong to you, not the state. Get advice before starting tribunal proceedings, because GOV.UK says HMRC cannot then take forward the minimum-wage complaint.

Sources

1. Our minimum-wage naming dataset, labourlaws.co.uk. Analysis compiled on 8 October 2026 from 24 government releases and official lists, covering 28 February 2014 to 3 September 2026. Round, sector and employer figures come from these listings. Totals and averages are our calculations; whole-pound aggregates are rounded separately.
2. National Minimum Wage Act 1998, legislation.gov.uk.
3. National Minimum Wage (Amendment) Regulations 2026, legislation.gov.uk.
4. National Minimum Wage and National Living Wage rates and minimum wage rates for 2026, GOV.UK.
5. Calculating the minimum wage, GOV.UK. See eligibility and unpaid trials and counted working hours.
6. National Minimum Wage manual, HMRC.
7. Naming scheme resumed under revamped rules, GOV.UK, 11 February 2020.
8. Historical enforcement, prosecutions and naming policy, GOV.UK, withdrawn. Used for the historical penalty commencement date, not as the current naming policy.
9. Fair Work Agency enforcement statement, GOV.UK, updated 26 August 2026. Current naming thresholds, exemptions, penalty rules and arrears uplift.
10. Naming round of 3 September 2026, GOV.UK.
11. Plan to Make Work Pay and Employment Rights Act timeline, GOV.UK, updated 25 September 2026.
12. Employment tribunal time limits, Acas, updated 1 October 2026. Transitional deadlines, Scottish contract claims and early conciliation.
13. Compliance and enforcement of the National Minimum Wage in 2024, Low Pay Commission, December 2024. Paragraphs 6 to 10, 12 to 19 and Table 1 support the reality checks, causes and care-sector discussion.
14. National Minimum Wage enforcement and compliance report 2024 to 2025, Department for Business and Trade and HMRC. Enforcement figures used in the first reality check.
15. Complain about pay and work rights and pay and work rights advice, GOV.UK. Complaint confidentiality requests, former workers, tribunal restrictions and Acas contact details.
16. National minimum wage and living wage, nidirect.
17. Minimum wage, Norwegian Labour Inspection Authority.