You usually get redundancy pay based on your age, your weekly pay, and how many full years you’ve worked for your employer, with the law setting a minimum formula and caps on how much counts.

Quick Scoop

For statutory redundancy in the UK (the legal minimum), the standard formula is:

  • Half a week’s pay for each full year you were under 22.
  • One week’s pay for each full year you were 22 or over but under 41.
  • One and a half week’s pay for each full year you were 41 or older.

Your “week’s pay” is usually your average weekly earnings over the 12 weeks before you got your redundancy notice, including regular overtime and some bonuses, but it is capped by law.

Current caps and limits

There are legal limits on how much redundancy pay you can get, no matter how long you’ve worked or how high your salary is.

  • Only up to 20 years of service can be counted for statutory redundancy pay.
  • Your weekly pay used in the calculation is capped (for recent years, around the low £700s per week, updated every April).
  • This creates a maximum total statutory redundancy payment (just over £21,000 for recent tax years, depending on the exact date of redundancy).

Some employers offer contractual or enhanced redundancy packages that pay more than the statutory minimum, so your actual payout might be higher if your contract or company policy is generous.

Simple worked example

To make it more concrete, imagine: age 45, 15 full years with the same employer, and a weekly pay that is at or above the legal cap.

  • Years aged 41+ (say 4 years): 4 × 1.5 weeks = 6 weeks’ pay.
  • Years aged 22–40 (11 years): 11 × 1 week = 11 weeks’ pay.
  • Total = 17 weeks’ pay; this is then multiplied by the statutory weekly cap to give the final redundancy figure.

So how much redundancy pay you get in practice depends on your age bands over your service, your weekly pay (up to the cap), and whether your employer offers anything above the statutory minimum.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.