Querying national insurance overpayment?

AndrewsF99

Hi all, 

I've just gone through my current and previous tax years and cannot make sense of my national insurance payments. 

I've typed my yearly salaries into income tax calculator websites to work out exactly how much tax and NI I should have paid but they don't match what shows on my government gateway account. I don't know how accurate these calculators are so I've tried to manually calculate what I should have paid each year but I'm going round in circles and not getting the same answer twice so hoping for a little bit of guidance or help

Some figures, in 2020-2021, my salary was £22 489.07 and I paid £2443.80 in tax and £1764.43 in NI.

In 2021/22 I was paid £29 164.04, tax £3274.80 and NI was £2608.74.

In 2022/23 I was paid £43 339, tax £6110 and NI £4197.70 and for the current tax year 2023/24 I was paid £48 882.48, tax £7218.60 and £3932.83.

I pay professional memberships and have uniform allowance so my tax code is 1278, NI category A. I also pay plan 2 student loan and a postgraduate student loan but I can't see anywhere that these would affect my NI payments. I have one employed job and have been with the same employer since 2019. Before 2019, I had three jobs in one year, one of which had a company car, which I'm aware would skew tax/NI payments as it was seen as a company benefit. 

I did get an email a few years ago asking if I wanted to pay extra to make up the underplayed NI years of when I had my first job at 15, which I declined as I knew I would still contribute a full 40 years ahead of state pension age.

Any help or explanation would be greatly appreciated as I'm pulling my hair out trying to work out where I am going wrong with my calculations. 

Ferro

You will never get the same answer. NI is calculated per pay period, not annually. 

For example, if you earned under the threshold for one month, none of the earnings would have NI applied. Similarly you could have gone over the threshold above which the higher rate of NI of 2% applied in one month. Thats the way NI works. 

Dazed_and_C0nfused

National Insurance is calculated independently each pay day so you would have to check each and every pay slip to see if it was correct or not.

But that's going to be a waste of time I would suspect it's 99.99999% likely to be correct.

chrisbur

If you have not had any pay periods when national insurance was not paid due to low earnings is it possible that your pension scheme is one that is deducted from your gross pay before tax is calculated and you are using the taxable gross pay to work out the NI as well as the tax.