Almost 660 Employers Named and Shamed for Minimum Wage Breaches

On the 3rd September 2026, the Government published its latest “naming and shaming” list of employers found to have breached National Minimum Wage (NMW) and National Living Wage (NLW) requirements, with 658 employers identified.

National Minimum Wage: Named and Shamed

658 employers have been named and shamed by the Government for breaches of their legal obligation to pay workers at least the National Minimum Wage and National Living Wage. This is the first naming round since the Fair Work Agency was established in April 2026, with HMRC continuing to enforce the minimum wage on its behalf.

High-profile names and organisations on the list include B&Q, Five Guys, Serco, Leeds United Football Club and Tesco, alongside a number of NHS bodies, care providers, nurseries, hospitality businesses and other employers.

More than 27,000 workers were found to have been underpaid around £4 million by the employers named and shamed, with the businesses responsible receiving approximately £7 million in financial penalties. Since the naming scheme was introduced in 2011, more than £100 million in penalties have been issued to over 5,200 employers, resulting in more than £66 million being repaid to around 650,000 workers.

Employers who fail to pay the minimum wage can face financial penalties of 200% of the underpayment, capped at £20,000 per worker. Naming and shaming creates an additional reputational consequence alongside the requirement to repay affected workers and the financial penalty imposed for the breach.

The top 10 of the 658 employers named and shamed for failing to pay the National Minimum Wage and National Living Wage were as follows:

Named and Shamed Under the Fair Work Agency

This latest round is significant because it is the first time employers have been named and shamed since the Fair Work Agency was established on 7 April 2026.

The position is, however, slightly more nuanced than suggesting that the Fair Work Agency has already taken over the entirety of National Minimum Wage enforcement. From 7 April 2026, the FWA became legally responsible for enforcing the minimum wage, but the operational function did not immediately transfer from HMRC. During the Agency’s first year, from April 2026 to March 2027, HMRC continues to investigate and enforce National Minimum Wage breaches under contract on the FWA’s behalf while the new Agency develops the systems, processes and infrastructure needed to absorb the function.

From April 2027, around 500 HMRC staff working on National Minimum Wage enforcement are due to transfer into the Fair Work Agency, at which point the operational function will move fully into the new body. The transitional year is intended to allow enforcement to continue without interruption while the FWA builds towards becoming the single operational enforcement agency.

Being Named and Shamed Does Not Tell the Whole Story

The responses from some of the employers on the latest list nevertheless demonstrate why an employer being named and shamed does not, by itself, explain how or why the breach occurred. Minimum wage breaches can arise from technical issues involving matters such as uniforms, salary sacrifice, accommodation, unpaid working time and the interaction between payroll and time-recording systems. An employer can therefore be publicly identified even where the underlying breach resulted from the technical operation of the Regulations rather than a deliberate decision to underpay staff.

B&Q, which appears at the top of the list, says its underpayments were unintentional and arose from calculations involving geographical allowances paid in addition to basic hourly rates. It says all affected workers were repaid in July 2025. Five Guys similarly attributed its approximately £55,000 shortfall across nearly 3,700 employees to technical differences in the application of payroll rules.

Serco says its breach resulted from a technical salary-sacrifice issue affecting one contract more than two years ago and was rectified once identified. Tesco, which appears on the list for an underpayment of £227.84 to one employee, described the problem as an isolated administrative error that was quickly corrected. Whitbread has likewise attributed its underpayment to an administrative mistake.

Perhaps the clearest example of the complexity comes from St George’s, Epsom and St Helier Hospital Group. The Trusts maintain that no colleagues received gross salaries below the National Minimum Wage. They say the breach arose from a technical compliance issue because part of employees' salaries sacrificed for benefits, such as childcare, was not counted for National Minimum Wage purposes, even though their gross salaries remained above the statutory minimum. The hospitals have since changed their processes to improve compliance.

None of this removes an employer's legal responsibility to comply with the National Minimum Wage Regulations. However, the fact that an organisation has been named and shamed should not automatically be interpreted as evidence that it deliberately chose to pay workers below the statutory minimum.

Fair Work Agency: Proportionality in Minimum Wage Enforcement

The Fair Work Agency's own enforcement policy now expressly recognises that not every technical underpayment warrants the same response.

Its enforcement statement commits the Agency to proportionality, transparency and risk-based targeting. It also permits self-correction in certain circumstances and states that a Notice of Underpayment should ordinarily not be issued where an employer has already identified and correctly repaid arrears before an investigation begins. That can affect whether an employer is ultimately publicly named and shamed.

More significantly, the Secretary of State has issued a direction dealing with certain salary-sacrifice and deduction arrangements. Where tightly defined conditions are satisfied, for example, the worker consented to the arrangement, received the relevant benefit and suffered little or no practical detriment, the employer may avoid both a financial penalty and public naming, although historical arrears must still be repaid.

These developments reflect a recognition that not all minimum wage breaches are of the same character or seriousness. There is an obvious distinction between deliberate underpayment and a technical breach arising from the operation of an otherwise legitimate remuneration arrangement. The approach to public naming therefore appears to be moving towards a more proportionate assessment of the circumstances, including how the breach arose and the level of detriment suffered by workers.

The Need For Transparency

The six-year reach of minimum wage enforcement makes transparency around public naming particularly important. A Notice of Underpayment can cover underpayments arising during the six years before the notice is issued. This means that an employer being named and shamed in 2026 may be appearing on the list because of payroll practices or underpayments dating back several years.

The financial consequences of a historic breach can also change over time. Where minimum wage rates have increased since the underpayment arose, arrears can be uplifted by reference to the current applicable minimum wage rate rather than being limited to the original cash shortfall. A historic breach can therefore remain enforceable for years and result in a greater repayment liability by the time enforcement action is taken.

Against that background, the September publication identifies each employer, the amount of arrears and the number of affected workers, but does not identify when the relevant underpayments occurred. The Government does publish an educational bulletin alongside the naming round providing additional information about the types of issues that can result in minimum wage underpayments. However, it does not provide the corresponding dates or periods of the breaches attributed to individual employers. A reader can therefore understand more about how minimum wage breaches arise generally, but still cannot tell whether a particular employer has been named and shamed for recent conduct or for a historic breach that may have arisen and been corrected considerably earlier.

Responses from individual employers demonstrate why that distinction matters. As we highlighted in a previous article on minimum wage breaches, employers can be named and shamed in relation to conduct that is no longer current. B&Q says all affected workers were paid in full by July 2025, more than a year before the September 2026 naming round, while Serco says its technical error affected a contract more than two years ago and was rectified once identified.

At present, much of this additional timing context therefore depends upon individual employers choosing to explain publicly when and how their breach arose. That produces an incomplete picture and carries an obvious risk of selection bias: employers with a technical, historic or otherwise explanatory account may be more likely to respond publicly than those without one. Those responses are useful, but they are no substitute for consistent information within the Government's own publication.

The Government should therefore provide enough context in future publications to distinguish between:

• deliberate or persistent underpayment;
• technical or administrative breaches;
• historic breaches that have already been corrected; and
• employers whose practices remain the subject of current enforcement action.

That would not weaken the deterrent effect of having employers named and shamed. It would, however, make the information more useful and allow workers, customers and the wider public to understand the nature and timing of the breach.

Named and Shamed Lists Must Remain an Enforcement Tool

The Fair Work Agency's enforcement statement makes clear that public naming is deliberately intended to impose social and economic sanctions on employers in addition to financial penalties. There is a legitimate public interest in employers being named and shamed where workers have been denied their statutory entitlement, particularly where underpayment is deliberate, repeated or ignored after being identified.

But reputational sanctions need context precisely because they can be powerful.

A business knowingly paying hundreds of workers below the minimum wage is not in the same position as an employer whose payroll system produces a small technical shortfall that is immediately corrected and does not recur. The fact that both could historically have appeared under the same headline illustrates why proportionality and transparency matter.

The Fair Work Agency's commitment to proportionality and transparency provides an opportunity to improve the system. Future rounds should identify when the breach occurred, whether it has been corrected and, where appropriate, the broad nature of the breach.

That would allow employers to be named and shamed where public exposure genuinely serves the purpose of enforcement, while giving readers enough information to distinguish active or serious non-compliance from technical or historic mistakes. The objective should remain straightforward: protect workers, encourage rapid correction and hold employers to account for serious, persistent or deliberate non-compliance without allowing a powerful reputational sanction to become detached from the circumstances that produced the breach.