NIS for 2026
If January was about PAYE, February was about NIS. The 2026 rules had to work for every pay frequency our clients run, and the hard case was fortnightly pay, where deductions need to respect a monthly ceiling that builds up across the pay periods in a month.
We rebuilt the NIS 2026 calculation to work month-to-date, the same way our PAYE engine already did, and rolled it out for monthly, bimonthly, fortnightly and weekly payrolls with commands and seed data for each. A run of fixes followed, including one for how age is worked out on bimonthly payrolls. We also updated the NIS Electronic Schedule export to the 2026 template, and added tests that check the rules hold across a full year of periods.
Children, overtime and showing the working
PAYE work continued alongside. Child allowance got its own management screen: payroll staff can add and edit children, spot records that no longer link to an employee, and handle claims that apply to earlier periods. The 2026 treatment of tax-free overtime was wired through the calculations and the reports, again with new tests.
We also shipped a beta PAYE explainer. From the PAYE page, a payroll officer can open a step-by-step breakdown of how an employee's tax was worked out, tier by tier, including why an amount may have been underpaid. It carries a beta label and a disclaimer while we refine it.
Under the hood
The backend moved to Laravel 12, and we retired an old time-off system that was no longer used. Payroll fields now have permanent codes in exports, and a new Financial Summary report joined the export list. Our test suite now runs in parallel jobs. We also expanded the secure API that lets Mintage Workforce and Mintage Connect read and update payroll data. The month came to 563 commits.
This article was written from Mintage Payroll’s commit history for February 2026. See Mintage Payroll today