Acquiring a care home is rarely a simple tick-box exercise.
It’s often fast, messy, and incredibly stressful.
Whether you are a large care group expanding your portfolio or a management company stepping in to turn around an ailing care home, you have a million things to fix from day one. You’re looking at CQC compliance, resident safety plans, building maintenance, and supplier contracts. The list is endless. But there is one thing that can derail your new acquisition faster than almost anything else, getting the staff payroll wrong in that first month.
Continuity of care starts with continuity of pay
In the care sector, your people are everything. They are the ones delivering care to the most vulnerable, often operating on tight margins and working demanding shift patterns. If their pay is late or incorrect during the transition, trust evaporates instantly. In a sector already battling a severe recruitment and retention crisis, losing staff because of a payroll error is a disaster you simply cannot afford. You need stability, and that starts with the payslip.
The TUPE data headache
When you acquire a care home, you aren’t just buying bricks and mortar; you are taking on a team. Under the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 2006 (TUPE), you have a legal duty to preserve their terms and conditions.
This sounds straightforward on paper until you actually look at the data coming from the previous owner. Or, all too often, the lack of it. We frequently see acquisitions where the outgoing payroll data is, frankly, a mess. We see missing
Year-to-Date (YTD) totals, “ghost employees” who left months ago but are still on the system, and total confusion over who is on a relief contract versus a permanent one. If you try to fix this in-house while simultaneously trying to run the rest of the business, you are setting your finance team up for burnout.
The Compliance Minefield
Then there is the compliance minefield. In 2025, the pressure on care home margins is intensifying. You aren’t just dealing with the National Living Wage rising to £12.71 in April 2026. You are now facing the double-whammy of Employers’National Insurance contributions at 15%, combined with the secondary threshold dropping to £5,000.
While the Employment Allowance increased to £10,500 in April 2025, applying this correctly across a care group with connected companies and multiple payrolls is a common stumbling block. One missed calculation on a sleep-in shift or a failure to apply the new allowance correctly, and you aren’t just looking at unhappy staff; you are looking at HMRC fines and potential cash flow issues right when you need stability most.
Why you need a rapid-response payroll team
This is where a specialist managed payroll provider makes the difference. At Ascend, we act as your rapid-response team during an acquisition. We specialise in taking messy, complex data from care home acquisitions and turning it into a compliant, accurate payroll. Ascend Payroll handles the heavy lifting that trips up in-house teams, including:
Data cleansing
We identify those “ghost employees” and spot gaps in employee records before the first pay run. Saving your business from costly mistakes and recovery.
TUPE Compliance
We ensure all transferred data preserves the employee’s statutory rights and continuous service history.
Tax code verification
We prevent the emergency tax nightmare that often plagues new acquisitions by ensuring RTI data is matched correctly.
Pension history
We ensure auto-enrolment history isn’t lost in the move, protecting you from future compliance fines.
The 12-month lock-in conundrum
Although payroll outsourcing may seem like an obvious solution, most payroll providers want to lock you into a rigid 12-month contract from day one. They know acquisitions are messy, and they want guaranteed revenue regardless of whether their service fits your long-term plans. But you may be intending to bring the payroll in-house after the transition, so although you need the immediate help, this tie-in can be off-putting.
We don’t operate like that. We understand that in an acquisition, you often need a transitional partner first, someone to step in and stabilise the ship. We don’t believe in holding clients hostage with contracts or exit fees.
We are happy to work on a flexible basis because we back our service quality. We will work with you on a timeframe that works for you. We have clients who do end up staying with us, and that’s great, but we give you the freedom to make that choice, not a contract that forces it.
Focus on the care, we’ll handle the rest
Bringing us in for the transition period doesn’t just guarantee your staff get paid, it gives you the breathing room to focus on the care home itself.
You have enough fires to fight during a takeover. Let us handle the complexities of paying the people who keep the home running. We provide the stability you need when everything else is in flux.
If you are planning an acquisition and need a safe pair of hands for your payroll, let’s have a chat.
Reach out to a member of the Ascend Payroll team today
