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Is donating via payroll deduction a simpler way to achieve this result?
[UK] Claiming tax back on donations as a higher rate tax payer with a normal job
1 min readDec 31, 2024
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Is donating via payroll deduction a simpler way to achieve this result?
I personally find it simpler to do it this way because:
Also I found ringing them up really quite straightforward, it took me maybe 15 mins each time.
If you:
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.
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:
Appendix: Example of how the arithmetic works
I'm borrowing this example from the Payroll Giving topic page:
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×£750=£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×(difference between old and new tax code)×£10=0.25×(gross donation amount)