Tax and service companies
Posted by Christie Malry on February 20, 2012 at 9:51 pm
Paintingwithnumbers has a go at calculating the difference between an individual paid through a company and paid as an employee:
Here is an example of two individuals, one who claims to be a contractor and has set up a service company, the other directly employed by the same organisation. The service company and the employee are both paid £150k per annum before tax from this same employer with whom both are contracted to work.
Company Employee Earnings before tax £ 150,000 150,000 Income tax paid to HMRC 17,700 53,000 1 Corporation tax (20%) paid to HMRC 30,000 Nil Take home pay 102,300 97,000NB. The taxation figures have been calculated using 2011-12 tax rates and allowances.
And the same calculation can also be found over at Flip Chart Fairy Tales.
Unfortunately it's totally wrong. The calculation for the tax on the dividend (the figure in bold above) is wrong. As I explain over at Rick's, the actual calculation should be:
((£150,000 2 – £30,000 3) x 100/90 4 – £35,000 5) x (32.5% 6 – 10% 7) = £22,130.
Now, £52,130 (£30,000 plus £22,130) is still less than £53,000. But it's not much less. The real saving, as anyone in this business will tell you, is on national insurance. The 'employer' doesn't need to pay employer's NI, and the contractor doesn't need to pay employee's NI. It's a pity the original article rather skims over this point. And a real shame that it got its figures wrong.
Notes:
- The linked blog post has 58,000. But this is clearly a typo, as the table doesn't otherwise add up. ↩
- The pre-tax earnings of the company ↩
- Corporation tax paid by the company ↩
- The dividend needs to be 'grossed up' for the implicit tax credit. See HMRC's website for an explanation. ↩
- The first £35,000 of dividends received in any tax year are taxed at 0% (really it's 10% less a 10% tax credit). ↩
- After the first £35,000, dividends up to £150,000 are taxed at 32.5% ↩
- Less the 10% tax credit ↩
And to fully realistic you need to include the costs of running the company too. Accountants, etc. Countered with the benefits such as office equipment (laptops).
So, with NI savings, the worker would save himself around £6k or so? What would pension costs, holiday pay, sickness benefit etc be worth annually? Being self employed doesn't seem to be a massive saving, though I guess it would increase the higher the pay rate for the job.
Nope. Ignoring business costs and benefits and assuming a 0% employee contribution to pension (in reality I'm sure you'd be able to arrange the service company to gain the equivalent that the employer would pay and if you pay that directly in to a pension, it would be allowable against profits.)
Employer's NI @ 13.8% would mean that the pot available to the service company would be £169,700 ish. So, more strictly, rather than a employee's take home of £90k, your dividend income would be about £112k. So you are up £22k. For, as you mention it, the risks.
My calc was off - dividend income would be £108k. Up £18k.
[...] how much tax she would have had to pay. Even if we knew what her income was, tax calculations are fiendishly complicated and determining the point at which someone becomes better off working through a limited company [...]