Nhs pension and benefit

theone8181 · 21 Dec 2023 at 07:24

Hi all, my wife has been working in a Dr's surgery for the nhs for a couple of years now. I was discussing kid stuff with my colleagues, and he mentioned about how child benefit reduces past a threshold. My wife is currently on around 51,500, but is in the nhs pension scheme (think it's the 2015 one). I'm struggling to find info about if this is salary sacrifice or not as I assumed that it was the scheme that decided rather than the workplace, but my research tells me this might not be the case.
What I'm asking is how bad is it if the tax hasn't been paid (assuming worst case) as she's had a couple of pay rises but they kind of went unnoticed (for reference she started on 48k, so you can see why a small increase each month could bump it over this magical 50k mark). Cheers.

Slam62 · 21 Dec 2023 at 07:40

Well pension payments up to a high level are tax exempt. So if the 50k is taxable pay then she will be under that. They might take your tax code off as well.

Kill_Phil · 21 Dec 2023 at 11:48

Check this out

https://www.gov.uk/child-benefit-tax-charge

Alex_L · 21 Dec 2023 at 12:30

Not a tax adviser….but salary sacrifice should be pre-tax & NI deduction so I’d have a look at her pay slips and see whether the pension deductions are before tax. That or see if she has any paperwork from when she joined the scheme.

Then you should be able to plug the numbers into the HMRC child benefit calculator and work out if you owe anything.

Destination · 21 Dec 2023 at 17:26

This assumes you earn less than 50k also.
If eitehr of you earns above it they reclaim a portion of your child benefit, used to be roughly 1% per £100, so at 50k nothing, at 60k everything (very roughly) so at 51500, she'd be giving back about 15% of the child benefit, but that's unlikley as the 52k is probably gross, so any NHS pension will reduce her actual earnings.
Any of her payslips will easily tell you this.

slinxy · 21 Dec 2023 at 21:36

Most public selector jobs have defined benefit pensions and are Relief at source, I only know this as I have two frozen public pension pots. i don’t believe it’s possible to get a salary sacrifice one.. you basically pay a fix percentage every year and when you retire they keep paying you a percentage of your pay, sometimes 100% of your pay, if it’s a final pay pension but it’s more common to have an average (of the last x years) pay pension for the rest of your life. If you leave before retirement, your pot gets frozen and you will get a percentage of the percentage depending on the original requirements. I.e. if you worked 10 years and the requirements was 30 plus years of service for 80% of the average pay. You will get 1/3 of the 80% adjusted with inflation for the pension.

It is possible to pay into an additional pension scheme at most places, which takes a phone call to HR and that will lower taxes..

Additional Pension | NHSBSA

Additional Pension is a flexible way of increasing your NHS pension. You can choose to buy a set amount of annual pension. You can pay by either: a lump sum payment regular contributions deducted from pay for an agreed period You can buy Additional Pension at any time during the year as...

www.nhsbsa.nhs.uk

also look out for the government changes to the pensions, which allows the pension companies to invest 5% into new uk startups.. not sure if the people will be given the option to not be included..

Obviously I’m not a charted tax or pension advisor…

theone8181 · 22 Dec 2023 at 07:07

I've not had chance to check her payslips (only just reading updates now), however her p60 showed around 43k taxable which leads me to believe that her pension must bring her under the threshold.
I had checked out that link earlier before I started this thread but I didn't feel it cleared anything up. It does seem daft that if you are paye you still have to fill a form in, it's government can't they just communicate with each other :rolleyes:

.

Semple · 22 Dec 2023 at 08:25

theone8181 said:
I've not had chance to check her payslips (only just reading updates now), however her p60 showed around 43k taxable which leads me to believe that her pension must bring her under the threshold.
I had checked out that link earlier before I started this thread but I didn't feel it cleared anything up. It does seem daft that if you are paye you still have to fill a form in, it's government can't they just communicate with each other .

Well I think they do "eventually" talk to each other - that's how people end up with surprise tax bills they weren't expecting. At least the self-assessment route lets you get out ahead of it so you know you've not got any surprises coming your way.

If her P60 shows 43k then pension has already been deducted and she should be fine for the high income charge.

theone8181 · 22 Dec 2023 at 10:47

Semple said:
Well I think they do "eventually" talk to each other - that's how people end up with surprise tax bills they weren't expecting. At least the self-assessment route lets you get out ahead of it so you know you've not got any surprises coming your way.

If her P60 shows 43k then pension has already been deducted and she should be fine for the high income charge.

Thanks that what I'm assuming.