maxb

To elaborate: Your tax code has been changed so that you pay a rough estimate of the right amount of tax via PAYE, so you don't face a big bill at tax return time - but interest rates change, as might the amount you have invested, so the exact amount of interest will almost certainly differ from the amount added to your tax code. At Self Assessment, you report all the figures - both the income actually received, and tax already deducted, and pay or claim a refund to correct for whatever extent the estimate wasn't correct.

The value is tax you have already paid via PAYE. I can think of two possibilities: 1) Perhaps, on the particular format of P60 you have been given, the value has been rendered with a negative sign just in an attempt to illustrate it as deduction. (Employers are allowed to produce their own substitute P60s, which don't have to follow a particular layout so long as they contain the required information. They may have made a less than obvious design choice.) In this case, you would have an actually positive deduction to enter on the tax return. 2) Or, perhaps, you really did receive so much of a tax refund via your payroll, that it more than reversed all of the tax you ordinarily would have had deducted from your pay from this employment - meaning you genuinely have a negative deduction. This would be unusual. The online tax return site seems to think it's only possible with multiple employments in a year. A quick thing you could check to give you a hint one way or the other, would be to check whether you actually received more take-home pay, than your actual gross pay, for this employment. (I say hint, because other kinds of deductions like NICs or pension contributions might muddle the picture.) Or, you might be able to ask your employer's HR staff to help clarify the details on your P60 for you.

@Adi A tax code is only an instruction from HMRC to employers/pensions operating PAYE, to tell them how to calculate how much tax during the year, based on ESTIMATES, so that at the end of the year, if your tax affairs are simple, you should have paid roughly the right amount. When you do Self Assessment, it looks back at the whole year and recalculates everything based on what actually happened. The numerical value of the tax code is not involved - now the amounts actually earned, and amounts actually deducted, are what matters. The important detail, though, is that any circumstance that was mentioned as part of how your tax code was arrived at, needs to be included in the Self Assessment so that it can arrive at an appropriate whole year calculation. In the example given by veer4646, the two circumstances were "Personal Allowance" - largely handled automatically by the online tax return site - and "Personal Pension Relief" - you do need to declare personal pension contributions that give rise to such relief in the return to claim it. Personal pension contributions actually make for a good example - unless you contribute exactly the same amount year on year, the amount in your tax code will usually be an estimate based on last year's contributions. When you fill in Self Assessment, you claim the actual amount you really contributed, and receive an adjustment to tax for any change. I hope that helps - to put it another way, the statement earlier that "the self-assessment tax calculation is based on the default 1257L" is a misunderstanding - actually the self-assessment calculation defaults to including £12,570 Personal Allowance, in its own right and not by reference to a tax code, and pretty much all other allowances, reliefs and charges require something to be filled in somewhere.

If these were salary sacrifice contributions, then you do not gain relief by claiming them as pension contributions (because they are not contributions out of your earnings after tax). Instead you gain relief because you have reduced you earnings before tax via the salary sacrifice. If you are on a cumulative tax code for PAYE, you may already have received this relief via payroll. In any case, you should just need to fill in the Employment section of the tax return using the figures from your P60 - that will cover reporting your earnings (as reduced by salary sacrifice), and the tax deducted from them, triggering a credit if too much was deducted.

Here is a bit more detail to help understand why that is: A tax code is strictly a way for HMRC to tell employers etc. how much Pay As You Earn tax to deduct during the year. At the end of the year, the tax return reconsiders the whole of your tax affairs for the year, and adjusts if PAYE didn't get exactly the right result. So nothing is ever finally dealt with in a tax code - all details need to be independently included in the tax return, so that the whole year reconsideration results in the correct calculation.

@prashantkant kant I don't know why HMRC don't just fix the website to show the information more usefully, but the pages for submitting a return never incorporate the information about the current account balance, which confuses many people, as evidenced by various forum posts about it. You have to take the figures from your return, and deduct any balance on your account manually. To get from viewing a return to the account page, use the menu links "Tax return options" then "View account" then "Tax years".

Hi Davidjl, It sounds like you may have an investment bond structured as a single premium life insurance policy, which is entitled to "notional tax treated as paid" - that is, a tax credit based on the investment company having paid tax over the course of the investment, which entitles you to pay less tax on the gain now. However, do remember that this is just a guess I'm making based on your word choices in an anonymous forum post, and you should satisfy yourself it does actually apply to you, or take professional advice. Unfortunately the tax situation is quite complicated to understand. However, if you are filling in your tax return online, provided you track down all the right boxes, it should do all the calculations for you. First, to run through why it is so complicated: 1) You have made a gain of £32k - this is £32k of extra income on top of the rest of your income for the year. 1a) If the +£32k does not put you into higher rate tax, things are actually simple. You're taxed at 20% on the gain, but you have 20% "notional tax treated as paid" on the gain which exactly offsets this. You pay no extra tax. 1b) But +£32k is an amount that could easily put someone with other income into higher rate tax. If so, you pay 40% tax on the portion of the gain in the higher rate band. The 20% "notional tax treated as paid" covers half of it. 2) It's not ideal that you are being taxed all in one year on gains built up over 10 years... and there is a relief, called "top-slicing relief" which may apply. It applies if the total bond gain pushes you into higher rate, but one-tenth (based on it being a gain over 10 years) does not. The calculation is hard but the website should do it for you. Which brings us back to filling in the website form... To find the relevant boxes: In "tailor your return" say yes to "other UK income... life insurance gains" In the "other income" section that unlocks, say yes to "Gains from life insurance policies" On the subsequent pages report the gain (£32k) and the number of years involved. Now finish off the rest of the return, and hopefully the calculation it displays at the end will make sense, given the rest of my message!

@Anthony Actually, if you are correctly identifying the contributions as covered by salary sacrifice, then BellaBoo is right and HMRC Admin is wrong. I guess HMRC Admin overlooked the mention of salary sacrifice in your initial comment. The box that HMRC Admin identified is for when you make a personal pension contribution out of income *after* tax, and your pension provided claims 20% tax relief on your behalf. However this is not what happens with salary sacrifice - in this case the sacrifice is deducted before you were ever paid, so you are never taxed (at all) on it, so there is nothing to reclaim. Your employer then makes an employer's pension contribution of the sacrificed amount, in exchange for having paid you less. This is why *all* salary sacrifice contributions are deemed employer's contributions for tax purposes even if they are only happening because you chose for them to happen. In your example of earning £45,000, you said that your salary sacrifice contribution benefits you at the basic rate... True, but not the whole story. It also benefits you by removing your contribution from the basic rate band entirely, making more room within the basic rate band for more of your additional £10,000 other income to fit into basic rate. This is one of the benefits of salary sacrifice - you get all of the benefit up front, meaning there's no need (or entitlement) to claim relief back later.

@ConfusedTaxpayer27 Thanks for the compliment, but I have no affiliation with HMRC whatsoever - I'm just an individual taxpayer who has spent entirely too much time dealing with my own affairs and my immediate family's :-) OK, so if it's financially important to obtain relief in 2023/24, I think you're looking at making a Negligible Value Claim. Before talking about that, though, let's talk about the "Relief now for 2024-25 trade losses or certain capital losses" box. The question is... is share loss relief a "certain capital loss"? I have been unable to find a good answer to this. What I did find is that someone claimed it was, was told they were wrong by HMRC, fought it in through the Upper Tribunal and the Court of Appeal being told no, but then the Supreme Court reversed the judgements of lower courts and said it was! https://www.supremecourt.uk/cases/uksc-2017-0127 Crikey. So that seems like a minefield. But here's the thing... you might not need to care about this because if you are going forward with a Negligible Value Claim, the NVC can create a "deemed" disposal for tax purposes at an earlier point in time ... provided the asset actually was of negligible value at that time. So, if you think you can show the shares were already of negligible value before 5th April 2024, you might be able to treat everything as happening in the 2023/24 tax year, significantly simplifying the form filling. As for actually making a NVC, though, I have been unable to locate clear instructions on how much evidence is necessary to prove negligible value - and what I have found online seems contradictory. For that, I fear you may need actual professional advice, unless you want to take a "try it and see" approach, and hope HMRC chooses to exercise the discretion described in https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/capital-gains-manual/cg13145 . I'm sorry I couldn't be more help - for my own affairs, I'm currently aiming to hold claims until companies are dissolved and claim only against my current year Income to avoid having to deal with much of this labyrinth.

You can't claim loss relief on the portion of the purchase price for which you received income tax relief (30% under current rules). But, you can claim loss relief on the remaining loss after taking off the amount already relieved, if the loss was greater - i.e. if the amount lost was more than 30% of the purchase price. Source: "If you claimed EIS Income Tax relief when you subscribed for the shares, the amount of Income Tax relief must be deducted from your loss." in https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/negligible-value-claims-and-income-tax-losses-on-disposals-of-shares-you-have-subscribed-for-in-qualifying-trading-companies-hs286-self-assessment-he/hs286-negligible-value-claims-and-income-tax-losses-on-disposals-of-shares-you-have-subscribed-for-in-qualifying-trading-companies-2024