5 Fun Facts about Pay for National Payroll Week

Looking to entertain and educate your team with interesting tales of payroll from yesteryear? Or even from across the globe today?

Following up on our popular payroll fun facts article here’s 6 more intriguing pay facts. Share these around the office, use them in a payroll quiz or get your team to guess some of the craziest expense claims or weirdest highly paid UK jobs for National Payroll Week.

1. The Origins of “Pay as You Earn” (PAYE)

Imagine a world without Income Tax…Did you know that it wasn’t until the early years of the 20th century before the number of taxpayers started exceeding a million.

World War II changed all this when extra budgets were needed and deduction from wages appeared to be the most practical way of enforcing tax liabilities. This brought the number of taxpayers to 12 million.

The PAYE system, which is used to collect income tax from employees directly from their wages, was first introduced in the UK in 1944.

Before PAYE, employees were responsible for setting aside money to pay their taxes at the end of the year, which often led to budgeting challenges.

If PAYE is something you deal with regularly and you’d like payroll support get in touch.

2. Weird and Wonderful Things People Have Been Paid With

In our last blog we covered beer as a payment method. Here’s some more:

The word salary actually comes from a history of salt when Romans were paid in salt.

Known as solarium argentum salt was highly lucrative for food preservation, flavour and as an antiseptic. It was also the origin of the phase “not worth his salt.”

Other strange ways people have been paid across the globe include:

Rai Stones (the literal definition of a heavy pay cheque!)
Kantanga Crosses
Parmesan Cheese (our Keeley might well swap her salary for that…)
Tea – Before you get excited these were literally bricks made of tea in China
Squirrel Pelts
Cowry Shells

Sorry, we can’t pay your staff in tea, or the chocolates we’re handing round the office but….

We can help you keep your employees satisfied with a smooth payroll process.

3. The Pub Hunt for Pay

Minors in the Welsh Valleys would spend their Friday nights going from pub to pub to hunt their employers to claim unpaid wages. Many minors got no basic minimum and were paid only by the tub of coal produced. Others were sacked for refusing to work on Christmas day.

However, in a world of low wages it was traditionally money that drew minors into private pits. Safety and conditions were often worse than the public sector but money was often the deciding factor.

Luckily National Minimum Wage is now a thing. We can help you stay compliant and help you support your staff with payroll and beyond.

Explore today’s National Minimum Wages for 2024-2025.

4. Most Bizarre High Salary UK Jobs

Looking for a change of career? Here’s some quirky jobs that pay well but may well come with a catch.

Stress Engineer – £65K – Not to be confused with a wellbeing specialist this type of stress involves testing the stress level of structures, performing ‘fatigue analysis.
Anaesthesiologist – £91K – This jobs requires a lot of training and comes with lots of high risk procedures in the medical field.
Geologist – £37-98K – Specialising from mining to geochemistry
Ophthalmologist – £82-197K – If eyes don’t make you squeamish and you’re up for a lot of medical training you could become specialist focuses on treated eye diseases such as cataracts and glaucoma.

We can’t promise to get you a job for £197K but we offer plenty of lucrative roles, matching candidates in highly paid legal positions and other senior jobs.

5. Strange jobs you can get paid for

Or if you want something a bit less taxing with a less lucrative salary than the above you could consider becoming:

A professional queuer – Standing in line for the latest hot tech or other items so the buyers don’t have to wait in the cold.
Pet food tester – Premium brands will use human testers on occasion
Waterslide tester – With an added splash factor rating and sharing the adrenaline rush you feel
Ravenmaster – carrying on the superstition of the old tale that if the ravens leave the Tower of London the building and the Kingdom of England will fall.
Professional tea taster – NO! Don’t tell our Debbie, she’ll be be off like a shot! This job usually involves a lot of travel too!

We haven’t got these on are list just yet but with over 40 jobs to choose from we’ll help get your highest for your dream job…as long as it’s not Chief Chocolate Taster.

Explore live jobs from Talk Staff

6. Weirdest expense claims

It’s one thing to push your luck, it’s another to go overboard. Here’s some of the bizarre claims and excuses over the past decade or so. Would you attempt any of these?

Crazy claims that got rejected