Unless you’ve been hiding from the trick or treaters for the last few days, I suspect you’ve heard about the budget released earlier this week. Now whilst I’m sure most people are fairly happy with what they’ve heard, I think a lot of us out there are reserving judgement until we’ve got to the other side of March 29.
However, just on the off chance we get through the spring statement unscathed I thought it would be useful to highlight some of the points proposed!
First of all, your personal allowance (the bit you can earn before you pay tax) has gone up to £12,500 (whoop!)
You’ll have to earn over £50k now before you start paying 40% tax (although this means that you don’t get the lower national insurance rate until then either so you’re not getting quite as much as you think)
Your dividend allowance is still at £2,000
Your capital gains allowance is £11,700
If you’re a business there are a few things which you may benefit from
The ‘Annual Investment Allowance’ (the amount you get as a tax deduction if you make capital purchases) is going up to £1 million from £200k for the next two years. This is interesting to know if you’re planning some major investment in the next couple of years.
If you contribute to the apprenticeship levy then your contributions will reduce from 10% to 5%
It’s likely that as a small business you should see a reduction in your business rates over the coming years, although there doesn’t seem to be any reduction targets attached to this particular statement yet!
All in all, not a bad haul for the tax payer but again I’ll be reserving full judgement until we’ve passed the dreaded Brexit deadline. I also suspect this may be buttering us up as I can’t see many significant rises in these standard tax reliefs after April 2019…..