The Salary Calculator

What would a 30% flat tax be like?

by Admin

Earlier this month, the 2020 Tax Commission published a report promoting replacement of our current income tax system, which has varying rates of tax (from 20% to 50%) and National Insurance (typically 12% and 2%), with a simpler system which has a single flat tax at a rate of 30%. They also recommended raising the personal allowance (the amount you can earn tax-free) to £10,000 per year, from its current £8,105.

I thought it would be interesting to see how this plan, if implemented, would affect us when we get paid each month. The following chart compares the April 2012 tax rates in blue with the simplified version in red:

As you can see, under this proposal everyone who currently pays tax on employment would take home more money each month, as the total amount due would be less. The 2020 Tax Commission say that as part of this plan, schemes that currently allow people to take income through a business, avoiding National Insurance, would be removed. This might mean that people who are using such schemes to avoid tax at the moment would pay more under the proposal.

But, as you’ve probably realised, if (almost) everyone is paying less tax, that means the Government will get less money. This is indeed true – the gap between the two lines on the chart represents how much less the Government would get each year – and the commission also recommend abolishing inheritance tax and similar taxes, which would further reduce Government income. This would mean further cuts in public spending – which would be difficult to swallow at the moment. More reaction on the report is in this useful BBC article.

Tags: 2020 Tax Commission, 30% tax, April 2012, Economy, income tax, national insurance, Pay As You Earn, personal allowance, tax rates

National Insurance refunds

by Admin

I mentioned last month that The Salary Calculator has a sister site called Employed and Self Employed, which helps with tax and National Insurance calculations if you are both employed and self-employed at the same time (or in the same tax year).

The calculations can get quite complicated and how much you earn in employment affects how much tax and National Insurance you should pay on your self employment. In researching for this site, I discovered that it can be quite easy to pay too much National Insurance on your self employment income if you don’t know about the details of the regulations and if you assume that because you fill in your tax return with both incomes, it will be calculated correctly. This occurs because the National Insurance you pay on employment income (Class 1) is different from the National Insurance you pay on self-employment income (Class 4).

In both Classes of National Insurance, you pay nothing below a certain threshold, a higher “main” rate between that threshold and an upper threshold, and a lower “additional” rate above that threshold. If you are employed and self employed at the same time, you can end up paying a lot of the “main” rate on both of your incomes, whereas if you earned the same amount just from either employment or self employment, some of your income would be charged only the lower “additional” rate of National Insurance. Fortunately, HMRC know this and they will, if requested, take into account any National Insurance you paid through your employment when working out how much you owe them for self-employment. Unfortunately, they won’t do this by default – you need to ask for it.

This is done by applying for exemption of Class 4 National Insurance contributions. This doesn’t mean you pay no Class 4 (unfortunately!), it just means that they will take into account how much Class 1 you have paid when working out how much Class 4 to charge you. If you don’t apply for exemption, they will charge you the standard amount, which might be more than you owe. Luckily, you can apply for a refund if you have overpaid in previous tax years (although not normally until 1st February the year after you overpaid). As a rule of thumb, if each of your employed and self-employed incomes were more than the lower NI threshold (£7,605 for the 2012/13 tax year) and the total of the two incomes was close to or  more than the upper NI threshold (£42,475 for the 2012/13 tax year), you might be due a refund.

To make this easier, there is a new calculator on Employed and Self Employed which will help you work out if you might be due a National Insurance refund. Choose the tax year you’d like to check (as far back as 2005 / 6 – the thresholds were lower in previous years), enter your employment income and self-employment profit for that year, and the amount of Class 4 National Insurance you paid that year. The calculator will compare that with what it expects you to have owed for that year, and will let you know if a refund might be due. There are details on that page for how to contact HMRC and how to claim the refund. The calculator will do its best with the data you provide but it might not agree exactly with HMRC’s calculations – it can be used as an indicator and HMRC will be able to confirm whether or not a refund is due.

Good luck!

Tags: class 1, class 4, Employed and Self Employed, national insurance, self employed

Student Loan repayment threshold

by Admin

Those of you who are repaying your Student Loan through PAYE might have noticed that this month your student loan deduction is a little lower than usual (£5-£6 lower). This is because the annual threshold for student loan repayments increased in April from £15,000 to £15,795.

Income-contingent Student Loans are repaid from the April after you complete your course, at a rate of 9% on any gross income above this threshold. This is similar to the way income tax is calculated – i.e. a percentage of any income above a certain “free” allowance. However, while the tax-free allowance usually increases by a small amount each year, the student loan repayment threshold has been steady at £15,000 since April 2005 – before that, it was £10,000. If you’ve been paying off your student loan for a few years now, you may be surprised to see this change. More information is available from the Student Loan Repayment site. The Salary Calculator is up-to-date with this change to the repayment threshold.

If you are repaying your student loan and you think you might be close to paying it off, this earlier blog post about Student Loan over-repayment may be of interest to you.

Tags: April 2012, debt, Loans, Pay As You Earn, repayment, student loan company, student loans, The Salary Calculator

Pro-rata Salary Calculator added

by Admin

For a very long time, people have been asking me to add a pro-rata tax calculator to The Salary Calculator – I have finally created it and added it to the site. As I have mentioned in an earlier post, pro-rata salary is normally calculated quite easily. For reduced hours, most employers will multiply the full-time salary by the reduced number of hours divided by the full-time hours.

For example, if the full-time salary is £20,000 per year for 37.5 hours’ work per week, the pro-rata salary based on a 18-hour working week would be:

£20,000 x (18 / 37.5) = £9,600

Income tax, National Insurance and other deductions are then calculated based on this new salary. To use this new tool, you just need to enter the full-time salary, the full-time hours, and the new hours that the pro-rata salary is to be calculated from. To check it out for yourself, get started with the pro rata Salary Calculator.

Tags: income tax, national insurance, Pay As You Earn, pro-rata, The Salary Calculator

Comparison of UK and USA take home

by Admin

You may not know that there is a US version of The Salary Calculator which calculates take-home pay after income tax and Social Security (which is like the UK’s National Insurance). I thought it would be interesting to see how much of their salary our American cousins get to keep compared with how much we get to hold on to over here. I used an exchange rate of $1.59 to the pound, and the 2012 tax rates for both countries, to create this chart:

As you can see, in most cases the Americans get to keep more of their hard-earned cash than we do. The top rate of federal income tax is 35% in the USA, and they only start to pay that if they earn more than $398,100 in a year – compared with 40% tax in the UK if you earn more than £42,475 and 50% if you earn more than £150,000. Also, Social Security is charged at 5.65% of most incomes, compared to National Insurance which is calculated at 12% (although only above income of £7,605 per year). You might have heard in the news some people saying that the 50% tax rate makes Britain unattractive for wealthy business people – this is what they are talking about – if you could run the same business in the USA and pay tens or hundreds of thousands less in tax each year, you’d think about moving – making any British employees you have redundant and employing Americans instead.

However, before you start packing your bags, there are a few other things to consider. Firstly, you can see from this zoomed-in version of the chart that if you earn less than about £12,000 per year, you actually get to keep more of it here in the UK than you would in the US:

Also, these calculations only include federal income tax and Social Security – most of the states charge separate income tax on top of what the central government takes, which The Salary Calculator doesn’t currently work out. Another consideration is that in the UK we can rely on the NHS to provide us with healthcare if we need it either for free or for a relatively small prescription charge, but in the USA health insurance can cost thousands of dollars per year.

Also, it can be difficult to get a decent cup of tea.

You can read more about US tax rates on The Salary Calculator (US).

Tags: 50% tax, April 2012, dollar, Foreign Currency, foreign exchange rates, income tax, Jobs, national insurance, Pay As You Earn, pound, tax rates, The Salary Calculator, united states, us