Client policies are moving rapidly away from PSC and “outside IR35” engagements. This is happening even where long-standing client/provider relationships are healthy, compliant in practice, and delivering strong outcomes. The result for many experienced consultants is an unnecessary disruption: your client still wants you, but no longer wants a personal contract.
Nuclear Consulting Limited provides a straightforward alternative. We employ experienced nuclear professionals on PAYE within our consultancy team, allowing clients to retain trusted capability through a compliant consultancy wrapper, and allowing consultants to keep consulting careers, variety, and autonomy. A central feature of the model is Bring Your Own Client (BYOC): you keep your client relationship and day-to-day role, but the commercial route shifts from PSC to NCL PAYE employment.
This is not an umbrella company arrangement. It is genuine employment inside a specialist nuclear consultancy, with access to a broader portfolio of work over time. In many cases it is also preferable to the consultant becoming staff with the client: NCL’s lean overhead typically means a lower total cost to the client, while the consultant retains more choice and cross-sector development.
Across the UK nuclear sector, the move away from personal service companies and “outside IR35” contracting is accelerating. Many clients are now unwilling to engage PSCs at all, even where the working relationship is mature, low risk, and delivering real value.
For experienced consultants, this creates a frustrating gap: clients still want you, but their procurement and compliance teams no longer want personal contracts. Too often, that pressure leads to a false choice between accepting inside-IR35 contracting on poorer terms or becoming staff with the client and effectively becoming part and parcel of that organisation, with little genuine control over your career path or the work you take on.
Nuclear Consulting Limited’s response is to provide a credible, compliant alternative that protects those relationships and keeps consultancy careers thriving.
We employ experienced people directly on PAYE within our consultancy team. This gives clients a low-risk engagement route, and gives consultants a proper employment home with portfolio variety across projects and sectors. This is genuine employment inside a specialist nuclear consultancy, designed for senior professionals who still want to develop, keep consulting, and keep their client relationships.
A central part of this model is simple: if you have a healthy client relationship that is being disrupted purely by contracting rules, NCL provides a way to preserve it.
Bring Your Own Client means:
This is a practical solution for consultants who are being forced out despite performing well and operating responsibly. NCL becomes the compliant consultancy wrapper around an already functioning relationship.
Just as importantly, you are not locked to only that one client forever. Your existing engagement is the starting point, not the limit. You can keep delivering there while also having access to NCL’s broader pipeline when you want variety or when client demand changes. That protects your income continuity and keeps your consultancy career dynamic.
For clients, it is a low-friction way to retain hard-won expertise without PSC exposure. For you, it is a way to keep your role and momentum without stepping away from consultancy.
NCL offers a genuine employment pathway for experienced nuclear professionals who:
We are not replacing consultancy with payroll resourcing. We are creating a stable, compliant consultancy platform for experienced people.
We recruit and employ experienced professionals across four core role families.
For people delivering deep technical value in areas such as:
For practitioners in:
For consultants working in:
For leaders who want to continue shaping major programmes without PSC risk:
We are candid about this because it materially affects take-home pay and perceived fairness.
Inside IR35 engagements deduct income tax and employee NI through PAYE, but often land worse than genuine employment because:
The practical outcome is often employee tax with contractor risk.
Under NCL’s model you are genuinely employed by a consultancy. PAYE is applied to a real salary, and NCL carries the employer obligations as your employer.
What changes in practice:
The result is a cleaner, more transparent gross-to-net position than most inside-IR35 arrangements, and you are taxed as an employee because you actually are one.
We want to be transparent about likely take-home outcomes, while being clear that every engagement is different.
It is also important to acknowledge a simple reality: no PAYE-based model will usually match the take-home position that some people historically achieved on genuinely outside-IR35 contracts. Those arrangements were more tax-efficient by design. However, they are now rapidly vanishing across the sector, and many clients are no longer willing to offer them regardless of the individual consultant’s circumstances.
In most inside-IR35 supply chains, the client’s day rate is an assignment rate that first has to fund employer costs such as employer National Insurance (and sometimes apprenticeship levy or umbrella fees). Only the remainder becomes your PAYE gross, and you then pay normal employee income tax and employee NI on that reduced gross.
Under true PAYE employment with NCL, you pay the same employee income tax and employee NI rates, but employer NI is paid by NCL on top of your salary, not taken out of it. Your taxable gross is therefore the full salary, with proper employment benefits alongside it.
Using a representative comparison at the same headline annual value, this structure typically produces a meaningful net advantage for genuine PAYE employment. In our experience, the take-home difference is often in the region of 5–10 percent, and in a worked example equivalent to roughly an 8 percent higher net position under NCL PAYE compared with a standard inside-IR35 chain.
This is a typical pattern, not a promise. The actual gap can be higher or lower depending on how a specific client and contract are structured, including:
We will always talk through the specifics of your client arrangement with you, so you understand the likely gross-to-net outcome before you commit. The core principle remains consistent: inside-IR35 commonly reduces net pay because employer costs are carved out of the same rate you are taxed on, whereas under true PAYE those employer costs sit outside your salary.
Employed consultants can work across a portfolio of projects, enabling:
This includes consultants who join via Bring Your Own Client; your existing engagement is the foundation, with the option to broaden out over time.
We invest in experienced people with long careers still ahead of them:
NCL operates as a consultancy, not a transactional resourcing pool. You are part of:
Clients keep the expertise they need without:
Clients gain:
Bring Your Own Client engagements are particularly valuable here: they preserve trusted capability without the client having to rebuild knowledge or relationships.
In many cases, NCL’s PAYE consultancy model is a better option for both the client and the consultant than moving the individual onto the client’s headcount.
For clients, bringing senior specialists onto payroll often carries higher fully-loaded costs than expected once internal overheads, corporate benefit structures, and long-term headcount obligations are accounted for. Because NCL operates with a lean consultancy overhead, clients can usually retain the same person through NCL for a lower total cost than employing them directly, while still meeting their no-PSC policy.
For consultants, becoming client staff can solve the contracting issue but often removes the consultancy features that matter: portfolio choice, cross-sector development, and professional autonomy. Through NCL employment, the client relationship is preserved without locking the consultant into a single organisation’s hierarchy and constraints, and with access to wider work when desired.
The net effect is straightforward: clients often pay less than they would for an equivalent direct hire, while consultants retain more choice and long-term career variety.
NCL can be engaged as:
NCL remains accountable for quality, professional standards and continuity.
If you are an experienced nuclear professional who wants to
keep consulting, keep your client relationships, and move into a PAYE model
that makes sense complete the BYOC contact form .
If you are a client seeking to retain high-value specialists
without PSC exposure contact us to discuss the route to compliant contractor continuity.
