Child Maintenance Calculator - Confusing

MuDPie92

This is my first post on these forums, hopefully this is in the right place...

Background...
I've recently split with my partner of 7 years on great terms.
Our son will be living with me 1-2 nights per week.
I will be gladly paying my ex-partner child maintenance to assist with raising our son.

My question is...
The calculator on the gov website states to input 'Total Taxable Income'.
I understand this to be gross yearly income, minus tax-free allowance of roughly £12,500. As the first ~£12,500 of all income is not taxable.
My ex-partner disagrees and insists it is just gross yearly income.
Which is correct? Can someone in the know please tell me or point me to a source?
If it is the latter, I think they should rephrase this to 'Gross income' to avoid confusion.

Don't get me wrong, I will gladly pay the correct amount. I'm just after clarification as the resulting figures are hugely different.

Thanks!

marcia_

MuDPie92 said:

This is my first post on these forums, hopefully this is in the right place...

Background...
I've recently split with my partner of 7 years on great terms.
Our son will be living with me 1-2 nights per week.
I will be gladly paying my ex-partner child maintenance to assist with raising our son.

My question is...
The calculator on the gov website states to input 'Total Taxable Income'.
I understand this to be gross yearly income, minus tax-free allowance of roughly £12,500. As the first ~£12,500 of all income is not taxable.
My ex-partner disagrees and insists it is just gross yearly income.
Which is correct? Can someone in the know please tell me or point me to a source?
If it is the latter, I think they should rephrase this to 'Gross income' to avoid confusion.

Don't get me wrong, I will gladly pay the correct amount. I'm just after clarification as the resulting figures are hugely different.

Thanks!

 Taxable income is what is stated on you P60. Which is usually gross pay minus pension contributions not your tax free allowance. 

poppy12345

If it was minus your tax free allowance then this would mean that all those earning less than this wouldn't have to pay CM, which clearly isn't correct.

nyermen

As I understand it - Taxable income is the amount that is eligible for possible taxation (ie. after pension / etc, but before any allowances etc are taken into account).
For earners over a certain amount of course, they lose their tax free allowance.

It might be more complex than that though for all I know - for example, do charitable donations count?  Would seem a bit unfair if an ex-spouse could donate a lot of income (maybe they have lots of assets) to avoid maintenance.

MuDPie92

Thank you all,
it's become clear Tax Free Allowance doesn't come in to play for child maintenance calculations.
Thank you for clarifying!