Contractor Tax and You
If you earn your money on a self employed basis, and contract your time to the firm that pays you instead of being hired directly by them, then your tax status is very removed from the circumstances of a person who is a direct employee of the same company. When directly employed , your company deducts your tax charges from your income before you are given it, through the PAYE (pay as you earn) tax system. When employed as a self-employed person, however, you are officially self employed, and are because of this accountable for working out and announcing your own contractor tax bill .
Contractor tax is worked out on a yearly basis , following a tax return filled in before a deadline of January 31st for the financial year ending the April of the year before . After you have filled in your return and gained an invoice for your contractor tax obligation, you submit your total tax bill in one go. This is one of the many differences between employed tax and contractor tax: with contractor tax you must put away a sufficient proportion of your wage to cover your contractor tax obligation at the close of the year , when working directly for a company; your tax is removed at source without your input each month.
Many of those who would otherwise be obliged to pay contractor tax choose instead to work as part of an umbrella company, which employs them directly so as to do away with the need for contractor tax, and charges their contracted employee for their labour. In this manner the umbrella company works as a middle man and in the process removes the issue of paying contractor tax, often also reducing the total amount of tax that the employee needs to pay .
As well as writing down what he or she anticipates to be an appropriate proportion of their tax bill each four weeks or so , someone who pays contractor tax will also need to make sure that their national insurance contributions are paid- these must be paid regularly so that the contractor tax payer stays eligible for the state pension when he or she reaches retirement age.
So as to gain a rough understanding of your likely contractor tax bill come the close of the period, you might decide to make use of a contractor tax calculator. Contractor tax calculators are found on websites and can be used to calculate an idea of what a person’s contractor tax might be. Users input all the variables they have about their ongoing fiscal period, including their hourly rate and the amount of time they are working , as well as any extra types of income, and the calculator then tells them what their contractor tax might be come the following January.