Tax return and one off payments to Personal pension

curtis122

Be somewhat gentle on me as this is a pension related question, they confuse me! 

My partner runs his own business and is a higher rate taxpayer, and chooses to make a £800 a month payment into one of their personal pension. (have 2 personal pensions) After not being sure how to enter this into the tax return we called the pension provider and they advised to put the full amount in the relevant tax field that they told us, (think it was something like pension contributions not coming out your pay) so for the year it would be 9600 which got entered.

21/22 tax year still paying 800 a month into one personal pension but paid themselves a £10k bonus and decided to pay it into their other personal pension.

What i want to check on was when we entered £19600, the final tax figure that the tax man owes them was large. When it was just the normal 800 a month it came nearly 2k what was owed to them (obviously worked out taking into account other info entered in the tax return not just pension), after adding the 10k it went to around 6k. That seems a huge amount and given the taxman scares me I just don't know how this came up with this figure by just added a 10k extra lump sum into a pension.

My question is how does the tax work with lump sum deposits and personal pensions?

Dazed_and_C0nfused

So first things first, you need to be certain of the method used to contribute as they all work differently for tax purposes.

You don't say if your partner is self employed or the director (owner) of a company but the most common options (by far) are,

Relief at source

Net pay

Salary sacrifice 

Your figures are confusing as typically someone who pays £800 would mean a gross contribution of £12,000, not £9,600.

Clarity about what exactly has happened and how the contributions are made (net pay, relief at source or salary sacrifice) is key here.