Workplace nursery benefits, now available through Kota and Kinsail

Ask a parent with a child in full-time nursery what they pay and you'll usually get a slightly embarrassed laugh before the number.

Twelve hundred a month is about the UK average, and in parts of London it's double that.

After housing, childcare is the biggest cost most young families carry. It's also the one that quietly decides whether someone drops to four days, or comes back after maternity leave at all.

There's a way to bring that cost down, and it has been sitting in UK tax law for decades. A workplace nursery benefit is a salary sacrifice arrangement: the employee pays their nursery fees out of gross salary rather than taxed income, so the same nursery place has less of a financial impact on the family’s outgoings.

With a workplace nursery benefit, that often painful circumstance can be avoided.

We're excited to be launching Kinsail in Kota

From today, Kota customers in the UK can offer a workplace nursery benefit through our new partnership with Kinsail.

On full-time fees that can be up to thousands of pounds a year back in a parent's pocket, every year their child is in nursery.

Kinsail work with over a thousand nurseries across the UK and will take on any Ofsted-registered setting a parent names. They don't charge parents a fee, so the whole saving stays with the family.

How it works for employers

Sign up for Kinsail through your Kota account and we'll help you get set up. You sign an agreement, make one payroll change, and Kinsail run it from there - the nursery agreements, the onboarding, the admin.

Most employers are up and running inside a few weeks and parents can start saving.

There is no charge to employees. There's no minimum headcount either, so a twenty-person company can offer it on the same terms as a two-thousand-person one.

In Kota it sits alongside your other salary sacrifice benefits and the rest of your benefits, with one deduction report for payroll rather than another provider to reconcile separately.

How it works for employees

Nothing about their childcare changes. Same nursery, same key worker, same drop-off. The only difference is which part of their pay the fees come out of.

They enrol through Kota, where it sits next to the rest of their benefits. No separate portal and no extra login to remember.

Because Kinsail take no fee from parents, the full saving lands with them.

What it means for both

For a family on full-time fees, this can be up to thousands of pounds a year they weren't getting before. Not a one-off either. It's every year their child is in nursery, at a point in life when money is usually tighter than it has ever been.

For the employer, it's a benefit that can genuinely change someone's decision about whether to stay, drop days, or come back after leave.

Childcare is the thing working parents most want help with, and the one most employers have never been able to give them. From today, you can.

Want to add it to your salary sacrifice offering? We’d love to talk.

Worth knowing

A workplace nursery benefit is a salary sacrifice arrangement, so it reduces an employee’s gross pay. That can affect anything calculated from salary, including statutory maternity and paternity pay, pension contributions, mortgage and credit affordability, and entitlement to some state benefits. Sacrifice cannot take anyone below the National Minimum Wage, so it won’t be open to every employee.

Savings depend on individual circumstances, including salary and nursery fees, and are not guaranteed. Whether a workplace nursery benefit suits a particular employee depends on their circumstances, and they should check their own position before signing up.

Tax treatment depends on individual circumstances and can change. This is general information, not tax or financial advice.