When will the social security contribution base adjustment be implemented?

Five provinces - Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Shanxi and Xinjiang - have announced their 2018 social security contribution bases. Beijing has the highest social security contribution base at 8,467 yuan, the only region in the country to reach 8,000 yuan so far. The contribution base used to calculate basic pension insurance benefits in Tianjin is 7,073 yuan, while the standard for industrial injury insurance, wages and benefits is calculated at 5,607 yuan.

According to the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, the base for employers to pay social security premiums is the total wages of their employees, and the base for employees to contribute is their own wages. When their average monthly salary is less than 60 percent of the local average monthly salary, they pay 60 percent of the local average monthly salary of the employee; if it exceeds 300 percent of the local average salary of the employee, they pay 300 percent of the local average monthly salary of the employee.

Data show that Beijing and Shanghai social security contribution base ceiling exceeded 20,000 yuan, ranking the top two. Beijing announced two social security contribution base lower limit, basic pension insurance, unemployment insurance in accordance with 40% of the average monthly salary of employees in the previous year to determine (i.e., 3,387 yuan), basic medical insurance, industrial injury insurance, maternity insurance in accordance with 60% of the average monthly salary of employees in the previous year to determine (i.e., 5,080 yuan).

According to the regulations of the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, the linkage mechanism between the base of social security contributions and the growth of the average wage of employees is implemented everywhere, and the human resources and social security departments at all levels take the average wage of on-the-job employees in urban nonprivate units released by the statistics department as the average wage of employees, so as to determine the upper and lower limits of the base of various social insurance contributions. Therefore, every year, after the statistical department announced the average wage of employees in the previous year, social security agencies around the world accordingly determine the upper and lower limits of the contribution base according to the new average wage.

According to incomplete statistics, excluding the five provinces that have already announced the social security contribution base, 14 provinces have already announced the average wage of on-the-job workers in urban non-private units, which means that the social security contribution base in these areas will be announced soon.

Social security contributions are related to the treatment of participants after retirement, only to reach a certain level of contributions, in order to achieve a better level of treatment, if the level of contributions is too low, the level of their pension is still low. In other words, the level of contributions should be increased with the increase in average wages, and the level of future treatment will follow.

For enterprises, although the upward adjustment of the social security contribution base may have some impact on the burden of social security, but at the same time, with the phased reduction of the enterprise social security contribution rate measures, the burden of enterprises is expected to be reduced in the end.

Since the average wage of urban non-private units around the world is much higher than the average wage of private units, some analysts believe that using the average wage of on-the-job workers in urban non-private units as the basis for approving the social security contribution base is not conducive to lowering the manpower cost of enterprises and reducing the burden on them.

In July 2017, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security announced its response to Recommendation No. 1815 of the Fifth Session of the Twelfth National People's Congress, in which the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security said that, with the proportion of persons employed in private units accounting for the proportion of persons employed in cities and towns rising, the average wage of persons employed in urban non-private units can no longer accurately reflect the overall level of wages of persons employed in cities and towns, which has led to the low-income people paying social security premiums on a The base figure is on the high side.

The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security said it will actively cooperate with relevant departments to improve the statistics on average wages, and study the inclusion of private enterprises in the scope of statistics on average wages, so as to change the current problem of "inflated" average wage statistics, and thus moderately reduce the base for low-income groups to pay contributions.

On May 15 this year, the Guangxi Department of Human Resources and Social Security publicly released the "Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region employees' basic pension insurance contributions and calculation of the treatment base to determine the method (draft)". The draft proposes that Guangxi will use the full-caliber growth rate of wages of urban employees (including urban non-private and private units) to calculate the basic pension insurance contributions of employees and calculate the treatment base for the next year.