The rules, the sources, and what happens to your data

What it checks

A carer enters their usual week, their pay, the payments and cards they have, and who lives with them. Safe Hours then adds extra hours half an hour at a time, up to 20 more a week, and finds the first point where they would lose something.

• Social welfare: Carer's Allowance and Carer's Benefit, the Carer's Support Grant, One-Parent Family Payment, Jobseeker's Allowance and Disability Allowance.
• Working Family Payment, which can open as hours go up.
• The medical card and GP visit card.
• Income-based rent for council, housing association and HAP homes.
• Student visa hours and the work permit pay floor.
• Income tax, USC and PRSI on the extra pay.

The answer is the number of extra hours that are safe, what each extra hour is worth after everything, and who to tell when hours change.

The rules, and where each comes from

Each rule below is re-checked against its official source automatically. If the source's wording changes, the check fails and the rule is reviewed before anything else is published.

Payment rates, tax bands and the medical card income limits come from the same dated rate tables as our other calculators, listed on our social welfare rates page. How every figure is checked is on how we check figures.

Council rent: 28 of 31 councils on their own scheme

There is no national formula for income-based rent. Each council sets its own, so Safe Hours uses each council's own published scheme. Where a scheme left a question open, the assumption we made is shown here and to the carer.

Data protection

Safe Hours is built so that it holds no personal data at all.

• A carer's answers are worked out on their own phone and never sent anywhere. There is no sign-up, no name and no PPS number.
• When a carer opens Safe Hours from a provider's link, one anonymous count is sent for that provider. It says that a check was made, the first thing that would stop that carer, and their safe hours in bands. When a carer sends an offer of hours, a second count says how many hours were offered.
• No answers, pay, council, IP address, device ID or any other identifier is sent or stored. The counts are kept by month for three years.
• A provider sees its own totals only, behind a key. No breakdown is shown for fewer than 5 carers in a quarter, and months show plain counts only.
• There are no cookies, adverts or tracking on Safe Hours. Fonts are served from our own site.
• Two things are saved on the carer's own phone, and nowhere else: the provider link they arrived from, so the installed app remembers it, and a student visa hours count, cleared each Monday.
• The offer message is sent by the carer, through their own WhatsApp or text messages. We never see it.

Because nothing personal is processed, a provider using Safe Hours does not take on any new personal data. Our site hosting is provided by Netlify. Questions from a data protection officer are welcome through our contact page, and our general privacy policy covers the rest of the site.

Limits: what Safe Hours does not do

• It is an estimate from the published rules. The Department of Social Protection, the HSE, Immigration Service Delivery and each council make the actual decisions.
• It does not model self-employment, Jobseeker's Benefit, payments for people aged 66 or over, or caring for two or more people.
• It warns, but does not price, other things that can stop with Carer's Allowance, such as Free Travel or the Household Benefits Package.
• Council rent rounding is not applied. It changes a rent by less than €1 a week.
• Counts from a provider's link show use, not outcomes. They are not audited figures.

Accessibility statement

We aim to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 at level AA. Safe Hours has been checked for keyboard-only use, screen reader names for every button, focus moving to each new question, colour contrast of at least 4.5 to 1 for text, reduced motion, and use on a phone screen 320 pixels wide, the same as 400% zoom on a computer, with nothing cut off or scrolling sideways.

Known gaps: it has not yet been tested with a disabled carer using their own assistive technology, and that test is planned. If anything stops you using it, tell us through our contact page and we will fix it or give you the answer another way.