Year End Tax Planning - March 8th 2023

It’s not too late to undertake some end of year tax planning. If you have available funds, an obvious tax planning point would be to maximise your £20,000 ISA allowances for the 2022/23 tax year.

You might also want to consider increasing your pension savings before 5 April 2023, if you have available ‘pension annual allowance’ to obtain tax relief for any additional contributions. The pension annual allowance includes any unused elements from the last three tax years as well.

Under the current rules, the government adds to your pension contributions at the 20% basic rate. For instance, if you save £4,000 in a personal pension the government tops this up to £5,000. Then, if you are a higher rate (40%) taxpayer, there is a further £1,000 tax relief given when your tax liability is calculated, reducing the net cost to £3,000. This can be even more effective if your income is between £100,000 and £125,140 where the effective tax rate is 60% due to the restriction of your personal allowance.

You might also want to consider making capital disposals and accelerating capital gains into 2022/23 if you haven’t yet used your £12,300 capital gains tax annual exempt amount. This annual exemption will reduce to just £6,000 for gains made in 2023/24.

There are other useful tax planning points we can discuss as well, including in relation to profit extraction from owner managed businesses and in gifting inheritances. Please do get in touch if you’d like to discuss the best strategies for your circumstances.