Our Early Pay feature allows employees to request payout of some of their wages ahead of regular payroll.

These on-demand payments are restricted to a customizable portion of available wages, paid-out automatically, and reconciled with payroll automatically, all without involvement by a payroll admin. This guide covers the core concepts.

Integrating & automating Early Pay for employees

To integrate with Early Pay, you'll need to call two endpoints in sequence:

The Get Early Pay Status endpoint, which returns the amount that's available to request for a specific worker, the applicable fee, and other relevant details.
The Request Early Pay endpoint, which processes a request to pay-out available earnings for a specific worker.

This enables you to offer a user experience where workers can request some or all of their available earnings with just two API calls. As an example, this workflow could look like this:

You retrieve a worker's Early Pay Status and display the available amount to the worker.
The worker indicates that they want to request their available amount on-demand.
You display the applicable fee (available as part of the Status object) to the worker and ask for confirmation.
The worker confirms the fee, and you request their earnings to be paid on-demand on their behalf.
Everee automatically processes the available amount for payout ASAP.

How we calculate the available amount

So that Early Pay can be completely hands-off for payroll admins, we limit the amount that can be requested. That ensures the employee can receive a meaningful portion of their earnings, but holds back enough to account for corrections, errors, payroll deductions, and other adjustments.

The default available amount is 75% of verified gross hourly earnings, minus all payroll deductions.

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The limit is customizable!
By default, we limit Early Pay to 75% of gross verified earnings, so workers cannot receive more than that upon request. But this limit can be changed to suit different requirements and workflows, so just let us know if you'd like a different limit.

For example: Jane Appleseed worked two 6-hour shifts at $20/hr base rate, and both shifts' hours are verified. Jane's total verified gross hourly earnings are $20 x 6 hours x 2 = $240. She has a regular weekly payroll deduction of $45 for membership in the company's healthcare plan. This results in an available Early Pay gross amount of ($240 x 75%) – $45 = $142.50.

Jane's Early Pay gross amount of $142.50 is fully taxed, meaning that she receives a net payout of a bit less. Assuming an effective tax rate of 10%, Jane's net payout is $142.50 x 90% = $128.25.

When payroll is run at the end of the week, the Early Pay she already received will not be taxed again. If Jane doesn't work another shift that week, her remaining gross earnings are $240 - $142.50 - $45 = $52.50. After tax, her net payroll payout for the week is $52.50 x 90% = $47.25.

Payroll is reconciled automatically

Once earnings are paid-out using Early Pay, we automatically adjust the worker's upcoming payroll to account for the payout. It's applied as an adjustment to gross wages, and the adjustment is visible in the worker's profile under the "Benefits & Deductions" section.

It's fully compliant with tax law, unlike EWA

Early payments made via Early Pay can be fully taxed, just like regular payroll. We remit employer payroll tax and employee withholding tax soon after these payments are processed, which keeps you compliant with tax law.

This is different from legacy "Earned Wage Access" tools. Those tools can only transfer funds. They can't calculate and remit tax, so they just transfer a flat amount, often without compliant request-and-approval documentation for payroll advances, and ignore the tax owed by the employer on the partial payment of wages.

The IRS and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have stated that this naive approach is not compliant with tax and consumer lending law, creating a compliance risk for employers using legacy EWA tools.

Everee's Early Pay is different: we can handle the partial payout of earnings the same as full payout on regular payroll, taxing them accurately and remitting tax automatically.

You can assess worker fees automatically, if you want

Requesting Early Pay can come with a fee to the worker at your discretion. This can help cover any additional transaction costs for extra payment processing. The appropriate fee is automatically withheld from the worker's payout amount and collected by Everee. Just let us know how you'd like fees to be calculated and we can set this up for you.