Two part-time jobs and the IR

No, you will pay the same amount of tax, but if you have two jobs you will pay less NI than if you only had one.

Where you might find a problem is with the tax codes for the two jobs. This could mean you paying too much tax during the year and having to wait until the end of the year to get it refunded.

You should try to have your personal allowance and lower rate band assigned to the job that pays the most money, and have a BR code (basic rate on every penny you earn) on the other job.

No, the opposite is the case, provided you consider National Insurance to be a tax.

The amount of income tax you pay is a function of your total income from all your jobs put together. This means that if one job pays £15k and the other £13k, you will pay exactly the same income tax as if you had only one job paying £28k. This is the case despite the fact that you will probably pay more tax for the £13k job than for the £15k job (since you will be given a tax code which allows for your 0% and 10% bands for only the first job, and the 2nd one will deduct income tax at full basic rate for all of your pay).

Where you win is that National Insurance gives you not one (ca £5k) exemption overall (as with income tax), but it gives you that exemption *per job*. You will end up with roughly £550 more in your pocket per year doing two £14k jobs as doing one £28k job.

What if you are doing two jobs but they happen to be for the same employer? I'm not talking about a fiddle where you artifically split a job in two in order to pay less NI, but a genuine case of two completely separate jobs for the same employer - for instance a lollypop lady and a school lunchtime supervisor (both council jobs)?

Not sure. I would think it would depend on whether you had a single contract which specifies that you shall carry out these two different duties (which would count as one job) or whether you had two independent contracts (which would count as two jobs, provided they weren't, as you say, artificially split, for which part of the test would be whether normally these jobs are contracted individually and not as a package).

Interesting - I'll have to look into this further. My wife has two jobs, which have separate independant contracts, different T&C's, require different qualifications, and are always advertised separately as independant jobs. She's had one for a couple of years and started the other one recently. She could hand in her notice for one of the jobs and carry on with the other. There's no doubt that they are separate jobs.

But they are both in the same place and for the same employer, and she just gets one payslip with the pay for both jobs itemised on it. So she only gets one NI allowance.

Have you looked at the payslip figures to confirm she's really only getting one NI allowance?

Yes.

Sorry.

What for?

For asking a question which you might have construed as impertinent, implying that you might have been too stupid to check properly.

Thank you Jonathan and Ronald for your responses.