As of 13 August 2026, AI can only partly check that your UK employees are paid the National Minimum Wage.

What to actually do

1. Hand it to a person

   The route this page recommends

   Someone with a licence or accountable authority has to sign this before it counts.

2. Use a tool built for this

   Second choice

3. Do it yourself

   The distant third

   A chat interface, power-user skill, and roughly 1 hour until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Open the current National Minimum Wage guidance and calculator pages on GOV.UK, and save the applicable rates and rules for the payroll periods you are checking.
   2. Export the relevant payroll periods from your payroll system into a spreadsheet, using employee ID rather than names where possible.
   3. Add or gather the employee age or date of birth, apprentice status, pay reference period dates, qualifying hours, pay components, deductions and accommodation details needed for the check.
   4. Remove unnecessary personal data, then paste the spreadsheet or upload it to the chatbot with the prompt above and the official GOV.UK rate information.
   5. Ask the model to produce the employee-by-employee table, calculation trail and unresolved-case list, and keep a copy of the source payroll export.
   6. Compare every flagged calculation and applicable rate with the payroll records and the current GOV.UK guidance, correcting any data the model misread.
   7. Send unresolved cases and the source records to your payroll professional or accountant before changing pay, reporting an underpayment or treating the payroll as compliant.

   Prompt

   Act as a payroll checking assistant for a UK employer. Check whether the employees in the supplied payroll data appear to have been paid at least the National Minimum Wage for the relevant pay reference periods as at 13 August 2026.
   
   Use only the data I provide and current official GOV.UK guidance. Do not invent missing figures, rates or facts. If a required input is missing, list it as missing rather than assuming it. Treat this as a screening check, not a legal conclusion or payroll sign-off.
   
   For each employee, use these fields where available: employee ID, date of birth or age band, apprentice status and qualifying details, pay reference period dates, total hours for the period, basic pay, overtime, commission, tips, allowances, deductions, accommodation offset details and total pay counted for National Minimum Wage purposes.
   
   First, state the National Minimum Wage rate and age or apprentice category you used for each employee, with a GOV.UK link and the date checked. Then show the calculation of counted pay divided by qualifying hours, explain which pay elements and hours were included or excluded, and compare the result with the applicable rate. Produce a table with employee ID, period, applicable category, qualifying hours, counted pay, calculated hourly rate, applicable minimum rate, apparent status and reason.
   
   Flag separately any case involving missing data, an incomplete pay reference period, apprenticeship eligibility, accommodation, deductions, unpaid working time, travel or training time, commission, irregular hours, salary sacrifice, or any other rule you cannot resolve from the supplied information. Do not mark a case compliant where a material input or rule is unresolved. Finish with a list of records and questions for a UK payroll professional to check. Do not include employee names, addresses, National Insurance numbers or other unnecessary personal data.

   Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.