Student with two jobs

FlubM

My daughter has a long-standing job on campus where she signs up for occasional shifts.  She earns less than £1000 per year from this and pays no tax. 
She has recently started to work 15 hours per week for a supermarket and will earn around £8000 per year so her total income will be below the personal allowance. 
She has just received her first salary from the supermarket and has had 20% tax deducted from the whole gross salary.  I assume that this because she has two jobs.  I believe that this should automatically get sorted out in the next tax year but that will be too late as she needs the money now to cover her rent.
It will work out better for her to give uo the campus job as this brings in less than the tax which is being taken from her. If she does this, who does she need to tell that she now has only one job - her employer or HMRC?  If HMRC, how does she do that?  How long is it likely to be before the tax stops being deducted? 

Bookworm105

She should immediately contact HMRC and ask them to split her tax code across both jobs so she will pay zero income tax in each job.
Tax codes: How to update your tax code - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

Income Tax: general enquiries - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

she should also learn how NI works so she does not pay too much NI across both jobs if she ends up doing multiple jobs that each pay well 
Tax on more than one job - Ridgefield Consulting | Tax & Accounting

Dazed_and_C0nfused

FlubM said:

My daughter has a long-standing job on campus where she signs up for occasional shifts.  She earns less than £1000 per year from this and pays no tax. 
She has recently started to work 15 hours per week for a supermarket and will earn around £8000 per year so her total income will be below the personal allowance. 
She has just received her first salary from the supermarket and has had 20% tax deducted from the whole gross salary.  I assume that this because she has two jobs.  I believe that this should automatically get sorted out in the next tax year but that will be too late as she needs the money now to cover her rent.
It will work out better for her to give uo the campus job as this brings in less than the tax which is being taken from her. If she does this, who does she need to tell that she now has only one job - her employer or HMRC?  If HMRC, how does she do that?  How long is it likely to be before the tax stops being deducted? 

It will be sorted out to some extent as soon as her new employer reports her first pay to HMRC.

That will result in an automatic tax code review and should mean spare tax code allowances will be allocated to the new job.

This might not be the optimum split if she didn't earn much on pay day 1 as insufficient allowances may be allocated to the new job.

So she should log into her Personal Tax Account and update her estimated earnings at each job and this should prompt a further tax code update. 

Her new employer should automatically refund any overpaid tax the first time they operate the new tax code.

sammyjammy

Ask her if she completed a new starter checklist when she started, if she didn't this will be why they've taken 20% off all her earnings as they don't know how to tax her, as already said it will be sorted eventually but if she completes the form now it will speed the process up somewhat.

chrisbur

sammyjammy said:

Ask her if she completed a new starter checklist when she started, if she didn't this will be why they've taken 20% off all her earnings as they don't know how to tax her, as already said it will be sorted eventually but if she completes the form now it will speed the process up somewhat.

It is also possible that a starter checklist was completed and the OP confirmed that this was her second job.

Bookworm105

sammyjammy said:

Ask her if she completed a new starter checklist when she started, if she didn't this will be why they've taken 20% off all her earnings as they don't know how to tax her, as already said it will be sorted eventually but if she completes the form now it will speed the process up somewhat.

given the statement "she has has 20% deducted from the entire gross salary" it is more likely she told them it was her second job. So they have applied a BR tax code to take 20% on the full amount with zero personal allowance in that job. Hence the advisability of splitting tax codes if you earn less than 12,570 (ie the full personal allowance) in any one job 

SiliconChip

Bookworm105 said:

she should also learn how NI works so she does not pay too much NI across both jobs if she ends up doing multiple jobs that each pay well 

While she definitely should learn how it works there's very little she can do about how much she pays. On the new regular job she'll pay whatever is due for the amount she earns each week, and on the original irregular job she may or may not have any NI to pay depending on how spread out the work that pays the £1000 is - if it's 4 x £250 for example then she'll have NI to pay, if it's 10 x £100 then there's no NI to pay. Whatever is due is based on the facts of what is earned when, and in general an employee has little influence on that.

FlubM

Thank you all very much, you have been very helpful.  We found that a new tax code had just been issued but the estimates of earnings for each job was not accurate - we have updated the estimates so all should now be sorted.

Bookworm105

SiliconChip said:

Bookworm105 said:

she should also learn how NI works so she does not pay too much NI across both jobs if she ends up doing multiple jobs that each pay well 

, and in general an employee has little influence on that.

I take it you did not read the link.
the employee has "influence" when it matters

SiliconChip

Bookworm105 said:

SiliconChip said:

Bookworm105 said:

she should also learn how NI works so she does not pay too much NI across both jobs if she ends up doing multiple jobs that each pay well 

, and in general an employee has little influence on that.

I take it you did not read the link.
the employee has "influence" when it matters

I didn't read it at the time but having done so it's currently irrelevant to the OP's daughter's situation as her earnings are nowhere near the UEL. However, I acknowledge that it could be of relevance to someone with two well paying jobs, a rather small proportion of the population I should imagine.