income assessment for carer’s allowance

I can’t get my head around the income calculation for carer’s allowance. My client took unpaid leave from mid August to care for her husband.  She is paid in arrears at the end of the month so on 31st August she got 2 weeks pay to cover her work til mid August.  Carers allowance are saying her claim cannot start until the 1st October because that puts her earning more than £100 till the end of Sept.  The DMG just made my head spin with stuff about due dates and indentifiable periods.  If her pay was made in arrears - is it correct that they have set it for a forward period? Is there an argument against this?

Correct me if I am wrong here but i believe that “Carers Allowance cannot be paid during any week where the claimants income from work exceeds £100”
If it is payment in arrears then those end weeks of August should not count, as no money was “Earned” in those weeks - the client was merely paid arrears that related to a different period of work.
I would see if the employer can confirm what weeks of work that the arrears relate to, and claim CA for the time after that.

Carers Allowance cannot be paid if earnings in the previous week exceed the statutory limit (reg 8 of the ICA Regs).  However earnings paid or due to be paid from employment that ended before the date of claim are ignored (para 12, schedule 1 of the Computation of Earnings Regs), otherwise earnings are usually taken into account for a future period corresponding to the period for which they are paid, i.e. a months pay is taken into account for the following month.

I had assumed that because she is still employed that we were stuck with the forward assessment but the way you have put it above has made me think we can argue that her pay on 31st August was payment for employment that ended before the claim.  What do you think?

There is a difference between work and employment.  It’s not the end of the work period that counts but the end of the employment itself.  In other words as long as a contract of employment subsists then you’re stuck with the forward calculation.