Tax/Universal credit pension contributions for non earning partner

rdansie

I understand that any pension contributions made by someone claiming tax credits or universal credit are deducted from the claimants earned income when assessing the amount a claimant is eligible for.

Can anyone tell me how this works if there is a couple making a joint claim and one of them works full time and the other is a full time parent? If pension contributions are made for the partner with no taxable income, are those contributions deducted from the other partners income? Or is it only the working partner who can benefit from pension contributions in this way?

On the tax credits form it asks for each partners income figures separately, there isn't a box to enter your pension contributions, and their advice is to deduct the pension contributions from the income figure yourself before entering it. So it seems the tax credits forms are designed in such a way that only the working partner could benefit from this.

Can anyone confirm this? And does anyone have any experience of this with universal credit?

huckster

Don't fully understand the question being asked.

Your partner who does not work, has payments made into a private pension on their behalf. And you have a couple claim now on Universal Credit and you want to know how this would be dealt with ?

If this is the question, a decision would need to be made by a Universal Credit Decision Maker. There is guidance for Decision Makers to deduct private pension contributions from earnings, which would affect each Universal Credit monthly assessment period calculation.

A Job Centre appointment would be required to take in the private pension contribution information, including payments made proof. A Job Centre Work Coach would need to request for a Decision Maker to decide on this. It may then take several weeks for a Decision Maker to add their decision to the claim and notification would appear in the online journal. If they decide that private pension contributions can be deducted, then each month proof would need to be supplied of the pension payment and then UC would recalculate the monthly award amount.

Previous thread on pensions and UC

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6001734/universal-credit-and-private-pension-contributions&page=2