Apprenticeship Levy

The UK government introduced the Apprenticeship Levy on 6 April 2017. The Levy requires all employers operating in the UK, with a pay bill over £3 million each year, to invest in apprenticeships. The Levy is charged at 0.5% of the total annual pay bill and the University will be required to pay this from next month. To find out more, please visit our Apprenticeship Levy pages on the Finance Division website.

Employers in England who pay the Levy will then be able to access funding through a digital apprenticeship service account which will enable them to select and pay Government-approved training providers and post apprenticeship vacancies. More information can be found on the Apprenticeships webpage.

The cost of the Levy will be calculated by PeopleXD at employee level and will appear as a separate column on the Payroll Costing Report. The charge will be costed to the same general ledger or project code as the employee so will result in additional pay costs at departmental level. 

Expand All

The payroll module on the Budget and Forecasting Tool (BFT)   has been set up to include the cost of the Apprenticeship Levy when calculating the budget for 2017/18 and for quarterly forecasting from Quarter 2 of 2016/17.

The Research Councils and Wellcome Trust have confirmed that the charge can be recovered through grant virement within the cash limits of the grant and we expect other bodies to fall in line with this. X5 has been updated to reflect this as communicated in the Research Services News. If there are any funders who deem the charge to be ineligible, the cost will be transferred to the departments cost centre by Research Accounts if or when we become aware of it.

Research Accounts will journal the Apprenticeship Levy on to all projects based upon the cost allocation from the applicable month’s payroll report. This cost will appear as a separate line under the Staff Cost Expenditure Category. If you are transferring staff costs between projects then you will also need to transfer the relevant apprenticeship levy costs.

Contact us


  : Payroll Services
       Finance Division
       University of Oxford
       23-38 Hythe Bridge Street
       Oxford, OX1 2ET

  :  payroll@admin.ox.ac.uk
  :  01865 (6) 16301