Summarise with AI
What gets filed, and when
Under payday filing, employment information goes to Inland Revenue every payday — weekly, fortnightly or monthly, whatever your cycle is. It replaced the old monthly employer schedule, and it means the reporting cadence is now set by how often you pay people rather than by the calendar.
Most employers file directly from payroll software, which submits automatically as part of the pay run.
What it contains
The filing reports the pay run itself: each employee's gross earnings, PAYE deducted, KiwiSaver deductions and employer contributions, ESCT, student loan repayments and child support deductions. New and departing employees are reported too.
Note what is not in it. Payday filing is a tax filing, not a record of hours. It does not satisfy the wage and time record obligation, which is a separate duty under the Employment Relations Act 2000 with its own six-year retention period.
Why hours are the real deadline
In a shift-based business the filing is rarely what delays a pay run. Getting the hours right is. Chasing a manager for timesheet approval, resolving a shift that ran long, or working out whether a public holiday was an otherwise working day — those are what push a pay run late, and with payday filing a late pay run is a late filing.
Capturing hours against the roster as they happen removes most of it: staff clock in, a manager approves the exceptions, and approved hours flow into Xero or Smartly without being retyped. See payroll integration, or check what has to be true first with our free payroll export readiness checker.
