Administrative Earnings Threshold Calculator

The Administrative Earnings Threshold decides what you have to do, not what you are paid. At or above it, DWP is barred from imposing a work search requirement or a work availability requirement, so the regular work coach appointments stop. Below it, both normally apply and failing one can be sanctioned. Your award, your work allowance and the taper are identical on either side of the line.

The test runs on gross employed earnings in the assessment period, before income tax, National Insurance and relievable pension contributions, and self-employed profit is excluded from it altogether. This tool applies both halves of regulation 99(6): your own earnings against £991, and, if you have a partner, your combined earnings against £1,597. They are alternatives rather than a single household test, so it answers for each of you separately.

Neither figure is typed in here. Regulation 99(6) is written in hours, 18 a week for a single claimant and 29 between a couple, at the National Living Wage, so the cash threshold rises on its own every 1 April with no new law. This page works it out from £12.71 an hour, which is why it cannot quietly go stale the way a page that quoted the pounds does.

No, and this is the most damaging thing said about it. It is not a cut-off, your Universal Credit does not stop when you cross it, and nothing about your payment changes. What changes is what DWP can ask of you. Regulation 99(6) bars a work search requirement and a work availability requirement once your earnings reach the threshold, so the regular work coach appointments stop and you move into what DWP calls the light touch regime. Drop back under it and both requirements can be imposed again. The award is worked out identically either side of the line: your maximum award, less 55p for every pound of net earnings above any work allowance of £427.00 or £710.00. There is no limit on the hours you can work on Universal Credit and no earnings figure at which it is switched off. The award tapers to nothing at a point that depends on which elements you have, which is a different question with a different answer for every household.

Because regulation 99(6) is written in hours rather than pounds. It sets 18 hours a week for a single claimant and 29 between a couple, paid at the hourly rate in regulation 4 of the National Minimum Wage Regulations, converted to a monthly amount by multiplying by 52 and dividing by 12. Put £12.71 an hour through that and a single claimant gets £991.38. Regulation 6(1A) then disregards the fraction of a pound, so the operative figure is £991, not £991.38. That rounding is not cosmetic. Someone earning a few pence over £991 is above the threshold, even though respected advice sites publish the unrounded number and would place them below it. Because the wage does the work, no statutory instrument is needed when the threshold moves, which DWP states in terms: the AET is based on National Living Wage rates, and when the wage increases the AET rises too. It is also why so much of the web is wrong. Those pages were right on the day they were published and went stale on an April nobody edited them.

No. There is no 18 hour rule and there never has been. The phrase is a folk name for this threshold and it comes from one arithmetic coincidence: 18 hours a week at the National Living Wage happens to be £991 a month, which is the threshold. The rule is about money, not hours. Earn £991 in ten hours and you are above it. Earn less than that in fifty and you are below it. At £14.30 an hour you reach it in 16 hours. Hours only become a fixed answer once you fix the rate, and even then they differ by age, because the threshold always uses the 21-and-over National Living Wage while your own pay may not: someone aged 18 to 20 on £10.85 needs 22 hours, and an apprentice on £8.00 needs 29. Nor is there a maximum. GOV.UK is explicit that there is no limit to how many hours you can work and still get Universal Credit, which is the part the old tax credits rules about 16, 24 and 30 hours still confuse people about.

Gross. Regulation 90(6)(a) defines monthly earnings as earned income before any deduction for income tax, national insurance contributions or relievable pension contributions, and GOV.UK's guidance has said exactly that since 19 August 2025. It is worth saying twice because DWP has not always applied its own guidance. In Gordon Bowen v SSWP [2026] UKUT 224 (AAC), decided on 15 June 2026, DWP took £87.49 of relievable pension contributions off a couple's £1,508.41 of gross earnings, arrived at £1,420.92, treated them as below the couple threshold then in force of £1,437, imposed a work search requirement and sanctioned the claimant for 28 days when he did not meet it. The Upper Tribunal allowed the appeal, held that monthly earnings for this purpose are calculated gross rather than net of the specified deductions, and directed DWP to remove the sanction and pay the arrears. The case did not change the law and did not correct the published guidance, which was already right. It confirmed both against the way the decision had actually been made. The judgment is free to read in full at the National Archives, and the practical lesson is short: use the gross figure on your payslip, and if a decision has been made on anything else, say so in your journal and cite the case.

This is the case nearly every other page states in a sentence and never works out, and it is the one that fills the forums. Sub-paragraphs (a) and (b) of regulation 99(6) are alternatives joined by "or", so a joint claim is tested three ways, once per person and once on the combined figure, and the two of you can land in different regimes. Take a couple where one partner works 28 hours a week at £12.71 and the other does not work at all. The earner is on £1,542.15 a month, comfortably over the individual threshold of £991, so nothing can be required of them. The combined figure is the same £1,542.15, which is under the couple threshold of £1,597, and the other partner has nothing of their own, so they stay in Intensive Work Search and must look for work. One extra hour a week for the earner takes the household to £1,597.22 and over the couple threshold, and at that point both of them are covered by sub-paragraph (b). One hour of somebody else's work ends the second person's work search requirement, without their own earnings moving a penny.

Employed earnings only, and gross. Every job counts and they are added together: the regulation refers to your monthly earnings, not to earnings from one employment, so there is no per-job test. Statutory sick pay, maternity, paternity, adoption, shared parental, bereavement and neonatal care pay are all treated as employed earnings by regulation 55(4), so they count too. Self-employed profit does not count at all. Regulation 99(6) excludes earnings that are not employed earnings, and GOV.UK puts it flatly: if you have self-employed earnings, these will not count towards the AET. So a claimant with £600 of wages and £900 of profit is tested on the £600 and sits below the threshold, despite £1,500 coming in. The exception runs the other way. If you are gainfully self-employed and the minimum income floor applies to you, regulation 90(5) treats you as meeting your individual threshold, so no work-related requirement of any kind applies and this test never runs. Where earnings fluctuate, regulation 90(6)(b) takes a monthly average over one pay cycle, or over three months where there is no identifiable cycle, so a single thin month is not necessarily the figure used. And if a job has just ended, the closing words of regulation 90(6) let DWP disregard the final pay packet, a discretion exercised case by case rather than a result this tool can predict.

No. It is a live question because the two thresholds are constantly confused, so here is the position, checked on 11 September 2026. Regulation 90 of the Universal Credit Regulations 2013 is unamended since July 2016 and legislation.gov.uk reports no outstanding effects on it. GOV.UK's "Universal Credit and earnings" guidance still carries a section headed "The Conditionality Earnings Threshold (CET)" as at its last update on 1 April 2026. And the Office for Budget Responsibility used the CET as a current category in its Welfare trends report of June 2026. The difference between the two matters. The AET is the same for everyone, 18 or 29 hours at the 21-and-over National Living Wage, and it switches off work search and work availability only. The CET is personal: your expected hours, normally 35 a week, at the minimum wage for your age, which is £1,927 a month for a claimant of 21 or over on full expected hours. Reaching it ends every work-related requirement, not just two of them.