Tax&VAT-free bicycles via salary sacrifice scheme

NKS

My company has recently sent through information about a new benefit - vouchers to spend on buying a bike for commuting. You can buy various denominations of voucher (up to £1000) and the figures work out at nearly half price, taken through a monthly pre-tax salary sacrifice over 1 year.
A friend said he's heard of something similar and now other friends are asking too - do you know if this is a new nationwide benefit not many people know about yet (like the childcare voucher thing) or something that is only being offered by certain employers?
If it's widely available, looks like a great deal!!

Sigur_2

Cool........

baz8755

I heard about this a year or so ago, I apparoached my boss to partake in the scheme but as with many things nothing was ever done:rolleyes:

waddy80

Lloyds TSB have a scheme which you can use to:
Buy a bike
Build upa learning fund (the company contribute aswell) and pay for courses, driving lessons or a personal trainer.
Discounted gift vouchers for major shops
Add to your pension
Buy childcare vouchers
Buy insurance products
Buy shares

I'm fairly sure this isn't the norm and it isn't anything that every company have to do.

Lakeuk

No it's company specific, company I work for does salary sacifice on pension contributions and PC's for the homes.

You need to research them as the discount is usually based on RRP prices and also you get a better discount if you are a higher tax payer (sadly not me). First year the PC deals were quite good (better than direct), this year the deals were no good as the specs on offer hadn't changed much in 12mths and the prices were much the same (not right for PC's). what was good is that the company organised a deal were they could supply you with a copy of Office 2003 for £20 (to cover admin) under some licencing agreement - terms were you had to uninstall the software if you left

They stopping the PC offers for next year due to goverment rule changes on the PC specific deal which don't make it worth while - Don't know if thats us or the company

Pegleg2001

It's called the Cycle2Work scheme and should be generally available to all tax payers.

I agreed with the boss of our (small) company if I could buy a bike under the scheme, reclaim the cost and then pay back the company installments out of pre-taxed salary over a 12 month period. I got a £180 worth of bike and safety bits for about £90 or so.

Details of how it works in the following article:

http://motoring.independent.co.uk/features/article348133.ece

fatboyonadiet

We had a similar scheme at work but the RRP costs were too high and after discounts the price was cheaper then high street but if you hunted about you could still get a cheaper bargain in other places.