Asda has promised to pay back 53,000 current and former employees found to have been underpaid for holiday and sick pay in the wake of its Project Future IT upgrade, The Grocer has learned.
The supermarket began notifying affected colleagues today after an internal investigation found that thousands were incorrectly paid between February 2024 and May 2025, as a result of issues calculating additional absences following the switch-over from its previous Walmart payroll system.
Around 80% of the affected colleagues were owed less than £19 on average, Asda said. It had committed to pay them all back, plus an additional discretionary 12% interest payment, by the end of February 2026, it added.
The supermarket has not disclosed how much the final bill could be.
It is the second major issue with hourly pay since Asda switched to the new HR system in February 2024. Thousands of store workers were left short-changed on the first day as a result of miscalculations in overtime and premium rates, as well as errors with holiday pay. Asda claimed at the time that the roughly 9,000 affected colleagues had been paid back.
However, The Grocer understands that a wider issue with holiday and sickness pay was identified, prompting Asda to launch an external investigation led by a top four accountancy firm.
It looked at over 200 million calculations between February 2024 and May 2025, and found there were further shortfalls in how holiday and sickness pay rates were calculated on payslips as a result of system issues, but also inaccuracies in the data that was being submitted.
The issues only affected sickness and holiday pay and were fully resolved in May 2025. The system was now “functioning as expected”, Asda said.
Overwhelmingly, the issue affected hourly staff in stores, depots and other Asda sites, with a small number of salaried employees also affected. Of the 53,000 total colleagues affected, 20,000 had since left the business, but would still be paid what they were owed, Asda said.
In March 2024, Asda sought to reclaim any money that it had accidentally overpaid to colleagues as a result of the errors. In the few cases that Asda had overpaid colleagues because of the latest error, it would not be pursuing them to repay.
“No Asda colleague will be worse off financially,” said James Goodman, chief people officer at Asda. “Whether you currently work with us or have worked with us, we are paying back every penny owed with 12% interest.
“Any colleague who has been overpaid will be allowed to keep the money, and we are repaying the money that was recovered in March 2024 because of issues caused by the switch over to Project Future.
“We’ve also taken the steps to ensure nothing like this can happen again, validated by external experts,” Goodman said.
Asda continues to reel from the fallout of Project Future, which has already cost it more than £1bn. The disastrous final implementation in August torpedoed what little progress there had been of Allan Leighton’s turnaround efforts, leaving bottlenecks in supply chains and empty shelves in stores going into the Christmas run-up.
It contributed to Asda being the only supermarket to lose sales and market share at Christmas.
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