malcolm coles

Childcare voucher schemes - the government’s scheme where you sacrifice some of your salary in exchange for an equal amount of childcare vouchers - make sense for employers and employees. Employees don’t have to pay tax or NI on the vouchers. And employers don’t have to pay employers’ NI. So savings all round.

Childcare voucher schemes: employers’ costs

Employers will have to pay a company to administer the scheme (but this cost is less than the NI saving). Here’s a list of the companies and how much they charge (remember, you’ll save more than this in NI).

Accor, Busybees, Sodexho etc childcare vouchers: administration costs

For some reason companies are reluctant to put these figures on their websites. All figures are for a one-person childcare voucher scheme.

• Kiddivouchers - 2.5%
• Voucher solutions - 4%
• Early years vouchers -From 5%
• Kids Unlimited - 5%
• Gemelli - 5%
• Sodexho / childcarechoice.co.uk - 6%
• Accor Services Childcare Vouchers - 7%
• Vouchers4Kids - 7%
• Employersforchildcare-  7%
• Faircare - 9%
• Busy Bees - still waiting for call back

So there you have it. The cost of running a childcare voucher scheme is between 2.5% and 9%. I can’t quite see why you would look beyond Kiddivouchers or Voucher solutions myself.