[UK] Claiming tax back on donations as a higher rate tax payer with a normal job

[Will Howard🔹]

If you:

1. Pay the higher (40%) rate of tax in the UK (earn over £50,271)

2. Don’t fill in a Self Assessment tax return (you pay tax automatically via PAYE)

3. Made donations that you claimed Gift Aid on in this or any of the previous 4 tax years

You can claim back 25% of the before-Gift-Aid amount by calling HMRC^[1], or writing to them by post^[2]. You can also apparently^[3] do it via online chat although I haven’t tried this myself.

I have personally called twice to report donations, once last year to claim for the previous 3 years, and once for the current tax year. Both times it was surprisingly easy. They just asked for my national insurance number, and the amount donated (before-Gift-Aid). They didn’t even ask for details of the individual donations, although obviously you should keep records of your donations in case you get audited, and you do have to give details if you are reporting more than £10k.

The 25% goes straight into your take-home pay (via adjusting your tax code), and this won’t happen automatically if you don’t contact them.

Further reading

This post is mainly to serve as a nudge for what I would guess is a common cause of losing money when donating, because of the manual step required. These articles are more comprehensive:

1. The official advice from HMRC

2. UK Income Tax & Donations by @harald, which covers more than this specific case

3. The Payroll Giving topic page

1. ^

   On 0300 200 3300, this is only allowed for reporting donations under £5k

2. ^

   Post only, no email unfortunately. The address is:
   Pay As You Earn and Self Assessment
   HM Revenue and Customs
   BX9 1AS
   United Kingdom

3. ^

   According to this post

[Will Howard🔹]

Appendix: Example of how the arithmetic works

I’m borrowing this example from the Payroll Giving topic page:

You earn £60,000 per year (making your marginal tax band 40%). You donate £1,200 to a charity after you’ve been paid. The charity can claim 25% from the government, giving them £1,500. And you can claim a tax rebate of £300 (1500 * 0.2), meaning you are only out-of-pocket £900.

The way they actually get the £300 into your bank account is by adjusting your tax code, which means you pay less tax for the rest of the year.

In a tax code like 1257L, the 1257 means you pay zero tax on the first £12,570. Changing this to e.g. 1258L effectively shifts all the tax bands up by £10, so if the highest band you were in was 40% this gets you an extra £4.

In the above case, they would add £750 to the tax-free allowance, to save you $0.4\times \pounds 750=\pounds 300$. So this would change your tax code from 1257L to 1332L (equal to $1257+75$)

You can use this to check they’ve done the adjustment correctly when you talk to them over the phone. It should be the case that:

$$0.4\times \left(\text{difference between old and new tax code}\right)\times \pounds 10=0.25\times \left(\text{gross donation amount}\right)$$

[Ian Turner]

Is donating via payroll deduction a simpler way to achieve this result?

[Will Howard🔹]

I personally find it simpler to do it this way because:

1. It’s easier to change the amount and where you are donating to

2. Not all employers offer Payroll Giving, you could probably ask them to set it up but that would be a hassle. I’m currently employed via Deel, which doesn’t offer it as far as I’m aware

Also I found ringing them up really quite straightforward, it took me maybe 15 mins each time.