Quote Originally Posted by rusty View Post
No, but you should know what your basic salary is.

When applying for a job you would see that the salary offered, for example, £12,000 per year. When you get your monthly payslip your gross salary would be £1000 then you may get overtime and/or bonuses then there would be deductions like tax and NI. What you take home is your net pay. If asked what the salary was, you would say £12,000.

In some cases where the basic salary is below the requirement of £18,600 then the case has to be put that including any other benefits your salary would be above the requirement.

Luckily I do not have to apply for a visa now as my wife is already here and therefore have not fully read the requirements for salary, but would expect that if your gross salary per year is above £18,600 the there should be no problems?
Same for me Rusty. Luckily my wife has her visa and is here now.

Just out of curiosity, however, I have been wondering about a scenario whereby an example offshore oil worker earns no more than £18000 in basic pay and then gets a day rate bonus for every day that he works. There are many of these people about, easily clearing the gross requirement by possibly 200% but might only be earning just below the threshold in basic pay.

On that footing, this kind of person wouldn't know how many days they would have worked in a year until after they had got to the end of the year. The only thing they could submit is their company drafted rates, their payslips and possibly a P60.

I wonder how the UKBA would deal with this scenario, given the current regs....

Sometimes bonuses can be a large part of ones gross pay.

The problem seems to be that the UKBA appear to be ignoring bonus payments even though their blurb appears like bonuses are to be recognised. This is a perceived problem for some future applicants who are borderline and depend on bonuses to get them over the £18600 threshold.