Employment Wage Subsidy Scheme (EWSS)

How to claim for employees and subsidy rates

To claim the Employment Wage Subsidy Scheme (EWSS) subsidy for an eligible employee, you needed to:

• include ‘EWSS’ as the payment type in the ‘Other Payments’ section on the payroll submission
• input €0.00 or €1.00 (depending on the capability of the payroll package) as the value of the corresponding 'Other Payment' made
• not include the EWSS ‘Other Payment’ details on the payslip you provided to the employee.

What Revenue did on receipt of a claim

On receipt of an eligible EWSS payroll submission, Revenue:

• calculated the subsidy payable and processed the payroll submitted
• made a payment into the designated bank account, generally within two working days
• calculated the Pay Related Social Insurance (PRSI) credit due in respect of pay dates up to 28 February 2022. This was posted to your online Statement of Account.

Revenue did not process the subsidy payment if you:

• did not have tax clearance
• or
• had an outstanding eligibility review form.

You should have contacted Revenue to request the refund be issued once you:

• obtained tax clearance
• or
• filed the outstanding returns.

You should have contacted Revenue through MyEnquiries by selecting 'Employer’s PAYE', then 'Employer's PAYE General Enquiry'.

Offset

You could offset EWSS claims against outstanding EWSS liabilities. This ensured that EWSS liabilities were cleared prior to new claim payments being made.

Subsidy rates

The subsidy amount paid to you depended on the gross income of each employee. The EWSS gave a flat-rate subsidy to you, based on the number of qualifying employees on your payroll.

Subsidy rates for employees working in sectors directly impacted by 20 December Public Health Regulations (PHR)

If you employed people working in sectors directly impacted by the 20 December 2021 restrictions, your subsidies were different. This phase of the scheme was called 'EWSS_PHR'. To claim EWSS_PHR for an eligible employee, you needed to:

• include ‘EWSS_PHR’ as the payment type in the ‘Other Payments’ section on the payroll submission
• input €0.00 or €1.00 (depending on the capability of the payroll package) as the value of the corresponding 'Other Payment' made
• not include the EWSS ‘Other Payment’ details on the payslip you provide to the employee.

Subsidy payment frequency

For monthly pay periods, reporting four or five insurable weeks, gross-weekly wage was calculated by:

• multiplying the gross monthly wage by 12
• dividing the result by 52.

You can find an example of this in Guidelines on the operation of the EWSS.

Next: Pay Related Social Insurance (PRSI) reduced rate