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Part 3 of 4: Statutory benefits that catch employers off guard
Of all the statutory benefits I deal with across our Latin America partner network, Argentina’s sueldo anual complementario, the SAC, is the one I’ve seen budgeted incorrectly most often, and it’s rarely because anyone missed that it exists. Everyone knows Argentina has a 13th salary. What gets missed is how the number is actually calculated.
SAC is set out in Law 23,041 and paid in two installments, roughly 50% by June 30 and 50% by December 18. The part that catches employers off guard is that each installment isn’t based on an average salary across the semester. It’s calculated as 50% of the single highest monthly remuneration the employee earned during that specific six-month period. That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should.
Here’s the scenario I’ve seen play out: an employee gets a raise, or a one-off bonus, in May. Nobody connects that payment to the June 30 SAC deadline sitting five weeks later, because on paper it looks like an unrelated compensation decision. But because May’s higher figure becomes the base for the calculation, the June SAC installment goes up too, sometimes by an amount nobody budgeted for at all. It’s not a compliance failure in the sense of missing a filing, it’s a budgeting failure that comes from not understanding how the mechanism actually works.
The other recurring issue is the fight over what counts as “remuneration” in the first place. Employers sometimes try to structure certain payments, particular bonuses or allowances, as non-remunerative specifically to keep them out of the SAC base. I’ve seen that classification challenged in labor proceedings more than once, and when the employer loses that argument, the result is a retroactive SAC liability nobody had provisioned for, on top of whatever the original dispute was about.
If I had one piece of advice for anyone managing payroll in Argentina, it’s to treat every mid-semester compensation change, raises, bonuses, allowances, as a SAC event, not just a payroll event. The two calendars, compensation decisions and SAC installments, are more tightly linked than most finance teams assume, and the gap between assuming they’re separate and realizing they’re not is exactly where unbudgeted liability tends to show up.
