Working Tax Credit

Basically it's a benefit paid to the low paid.

A few years ago the government decided that the low paid and families were paying too much in tax. Instead of doing the obvious, straightforward thing, ie reducing the amount of income tax they take off them, they decided to introduce complicated and bureaucratic tax credits, the WTC and the CTC (Child Tax Credit).

As a simple summary (well as simple as possible for anything devised by Gordon Brown), you'll probably be entitled to some if you are are single and earn under about 11k, or a couple/single parent and earn under about 15k between you, and if you haven't got children you need to be over 25 and work at least 30 hours, or if you have got children you need to work at least 16 hours and your age doesn't matter. If you're disabled the rules are different and you get more. If you've got children and earn over 15k, you'll probably not get any WTC but you need to claim WTC along with CTC because the elements of the WTC affect the amount of CTC you get.

More details and a calculator on the IR web site

But even the web calculator doesn't give you a straightforward result. It tells you how much you will get in total for the period between now and the end of the tax year. To convert to a weekly/monthly amount you need to divide by the number of weeks/months till the end of the tax year.

Bet you're sorry you asked now.

"Andy Pandy" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@spandrell.news.uk.clara.net:

Not at all! And many thanks for the explanation.

How do the government pay you this money?

Thanks

John

The employer pays it, and deducts it from the money they send to the Inland Revenue every month for tax and NI.

Jonathan Bryce wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@michelle.jbryce:

Thank you.

John

But if the recipient is self-employed, the money comes from IR directly to their bank account, usually monthly.

Alec

Apart from the childcare element of the WTC (which I forgot to mention), this is paid direct to your bank account. As is the CTC.

Not quite. The only choices are weekly or 4-weekly. Same for the CTC regardless of whether you're self employed or not.

OK, there's not a lot of difference between 4-weekly and monthly, but it does mean that your payment date in the month drifts throughout the year, so you can't co-ordinate credit cards bills, monthly DD dates etc with your payment date.