As we approach the new tax year for the UK and New Zealand, we are pleased to announce a series of updates designed to support your payroll processing, efficiency, and transparency across all jurisdictions. This release incorporates the latest statutory parameters for the UK and New Zealand, major new feature launches for the UK and Canada, and new operational tools to streamline your pay runs globally.
Update Date: 28/29th March 2026
NOTE: The changes for new tax year functionality will be working from the effective date of the tax year start in your jurisdiction!
✅ Actions Required
To ensure a smooth transition into the new tax year, please review the following guides and checklists relevant to your jurisdiction.
🌐 All Customers
🇬🇧 United Kingdom
🇳🇿 New Zealand
⚡ Global – Pay Run Recalculation & System Enhancements
We have introduced a major update to pay run management and operational resilience.
New Feature: Recalculate All This is a brand-new functionality for the Canada market. For the UK, NZ, and Australia, this serves as an enhanced addition to existing tools, providing an alternative to the granular recalculation workflow found via Payroll Administration > Payroll Setup > Update Payslips (Deployment).
What this delivers:
- “Recalculate Payrun” Button: Support bulk recalculation of all payslips in a pay run simultaneously, eliminating the need to update records individually IF you want to apply a global change across your workforce in this pay run.
- Stay in Control – Access to Recalculate All: Feature visibility is configurable by payroll role. You can restrict this action for other roles to prevent accidental large-scale changes.
- Safety First: The button is located within the pay run under the “More” menu. This placement ensures it is a deliberate action, preventing accidental triggers in cases where manual overrides mean a bulk recalculation is not the right choice for you.
Recalculate All - Function Guide
Customer Value:
- Efficiency: Correct pay runs significantly faster when global changes are required.
- Security: Granular control over who can trigger large recalculations.
- Reliability: Lower risk of data variance during the final pay run save.
🌍 Jurisdiction Specific Updates
🇬🇧 United Kingdom (UK)
New Feature: Statutory Sick Pay (SSP) Support We are excited to announce that ZonePayroll now includes dedicated support for Statutory Sick Pay (SSP). This is a new addition to our UK payroll suite designed to help you manage employee absences more effectively.
- Integrated Tracking: Record and manage sickness periods directly within the employee record.
- Automatic Calculation: The system now supports the calculation of SSP payments based on qualified days and statutory rates for 2026 for most employee types.
- 2026 Readiness: This framework is built to support your transition to the upcoming 2026 Statutory Sick Pay legislative changes.
Guide Available: For detailed setup and use instructions, please see our
.
ℹ️ Important Note: This feature is available for most customers. For organizations with high employee counts wishing to import historic data for linked periods and ensure minimum statutory payment, a professional services-led implementation is required.
Statutory Updates for the 2026/27 Tax Year
- Statutory Rates: Support for the 2026/27 income tax bands, student loan thresholds, and pension limits.
- Student Loan Plan 5: Incorporation of the new HMRC Student Loan Plan 5 requirements.
- Statutory Templates: formats for P60, P45, and P11D reflecting the 2026/27 reporting requirements stayed the same as 2025/2026.
- Support for SPBP Northern Ireland
🇨🇦 Canada (CA)
RRSP
New Feature: RRSP Employer Caps We are launching a significant update to our Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP) module. This feature enables administrators to create configurable RRSP packages tailored to their organization’s needs, allowing employer contribution caps to be defined based on either a percentage of earnings or fixed dollar amounts, along with reporting capabilities.
- Capping: A cap can be defined based on either % of an employee's gross salary or a fixed amount.
- Annual Employer Contribution Caps: Define and enforce annual employer contribution limits to ensure contributions stay within defined thresholds for the tax year.
- Standardized Tax Treatment & T4 Reporting: Automated tax treatment for employer RRSPs ensures correct CPP/EI applicability and accurate flow into T4 reporting (Box 40).
- Visibility: Employees have full visibility of contributions on payslips.
Guide Available: To help you transition to the new calculation base and capping logic, please refer to our
Improved Tax Transparency
- Tax Rate Dashboard: A new dashboard tool (Suitelet) allows you to view current tax-year rates and thresholds directly within the platform.
🇳🇿 New Zealand (NZ)
Tax Year 2026/27 & KiwiSaver Updates
- Tax Rates and Thresholds: Rates from the previous tax year remain applicable as no changes were legislated for 2026/27.
- KiwiSaver Default Rates: Updated default contribution rates to 3.5% to align with current NZ specifications. Note: Only the default rate changes; employees currently above the default remain unchanged.
🇦🇺 Australia (AU)
Leave & Remittance Enhancements
- Public Holidays: Updated dates for NSW ANZAC Day 2026 observance.
- Remittance Reliability: Refined error handling for payroll remittances with more detailed diagnostic messaging.
Customer Value:
- Efficiency: Correct pay runs significantly faster when global changes are required.
- Security: Granular control over who can trigger large recalculations.
- Reliability: Lower risk of data variance during the final pay run save.
🛠️ Notable Bug Fixes & Improvements
- Alerting Resilience: Resolved an issue with automated notifications for aborted pay runs; these are now correctly delivered to relevant roles.
- UK Enrollment: Fixed a CSV import error affecting specific pension data combinations.
- Canada Tax Logic: Corrected a logic error regarding additional federal tax applications on certain payslips.
- And general performance improvements and bug fixes!