Working from home - tax relief

jonp63

Great help and advice from MSE on this.  I used the HMRC microsite yesterday and got confirmation today of my tax code change (+£312 on my personal allowance) for 21/22.

I put my start date as 23/03/2020 as advised by MSE.  My question is how will I see this allowance retrospectively applied to the 20/21 tax year? 

unholyangel

Did MSE advise to put a start date of 23/03/20? Or did they say you can claim if you've had to work from home due to covid from 23/03/20? 

Assuming you are just employed (not self assessment for any reason) you will get a p800 when HMRC reconcile the 20/21 tax year....unless you applied more than a month ago, they issued a new code and your employer used that code. In that instance the refund would be on your payslip (if march then you would've paid approx £60-120 less tax in march and that was your refund for the year). If you're in self assessment, you would need to claim it on your return

jonp63

Hi and thanks for your helpful reply.  Yes the advice was to put 23/03/20 down as the start date if that was the date we started working from home.  As I was unaware until yesterday of this allowance, and only applied yesterday, I assume it will be the p800 route.

squirrelchops2

Hi, similarly to you I have had an amended tax code for 21/22. For 20/21 I noticed that March's  payslip I paid £70 less tax than I would have ordinarily to take into account the working from home allowance.

Dazed_and_C0nfused

https://www.gov.uk/tax-overpayments-and-underpayments

This is the way you should now get any refund due for 2020:21.

shezzer5

with regards to the working from home tax relief, how does it work if you don't earn enough to pay tax?

Jeremy535897

shezzer5 said:

with regards to the working from home tax relief, how does it work if you don't earn enough to pay tax?

It doesn't. If your income is below the personal allowance, reducing it by claiming expenses like WFH has no effect.

Scrounger

Seems rather harsh on the low earners 

Scrounger

Jeremy535897

You can't claim tax relief on expenses if you pay no tax. 

Scrounger

Jeremy535897 said:

You can't claim tax relief on expenses if you pay no tax. 

They could always send a cheque 

Scrounger

Dazed_and_C0nfused

Who wants a cheque for £0.00