Knowledge Bank

An umbrella company is a business often used by recruitment agencies to pay temporary workers. In most cases, the umbrella company employs you and pays your wages through PAYE. It does not find temporary work for you, this is done by the recruitment agency (also known as an employment business). Although the umbrella company is your employer and will pay you, the work you carry out will be for one of the recruitment agency’s clients. This work is often on a short-term basis.

Orca deducts a weekly or monthly margin dependent on the frequency that you are paid. This margin covers everything. There are no hidden charges and no other deductions that are made. All our payments to Orca contractors are subject to real-time payslip audits, which also confirm that no other deductions are made aside from the agreed margin.

All contractors employed by Orca are automatically enrolled into our workplace pension scheme with Smart Pension. Contractors can opt out of this pension scheme once they have been enrolled. This needs to be done directly by the contractor directly with Smart Pension.

Yes, you can pay into a private pension through Orca. Unlike other umbrella companies in the industry, we charge no additional admin fee for allowing you to do this.

If there are any NI savings that arise from your private pension these savings will be passed to you and will NOT be retained by Orca. Again, many other umbrella companies keep the NI savings for their business and do not pass these to the contractor, so this is a vital question to ask any umbrella company.

Yes you are automatically covered by Orca for Public Liability, Employers Liability and Professional Indemnity.

As an employee of Orca, you are entitled to holiday pay. This is a pro-rated amount of 28 days holiday. Orca offers 2 holiday payment models. Advanced holiday, which means your holiday is paid alongside your salary each time you are paid and is the most popular holiday payment model for contractors. The other is a retained holiday pay model. Orca will retain your holiday until such time as you take holiday or your employment ends.