No. UC excludes certain benefits in kind, but any payment of general earnings derived from employment counts as earnings for UC. Someone expecting a large final payment from work, including outstanding holiday pay, might decide to hold off claiming UC if the effect of the earnings would be greater than the amount of UC foregone by delaying the claim. If the payment predates the first UC assessment period, UC doesn’t care about it.
UC is designed to be assessed by machine as far as possible, with as little human judgement as possible – so it harvests figures from the appropriate PAYE fields and counts them as earnings for the AP.
