Claim for tax relief on private pension payments revelation

Goober11

As a higher rate tax payer I have been sending letters to HMRC to claim the addtional TR for a good few years now. I did this to avoid having to fill out a tax return. However, I recently watched a youtube video from the excellent Tony Newbatt who talked about the relatively new HMRC portal to claim for the additional higher rate tax relief. 

So for anyone in a similar position to me who does not do a tax return can I recommend the following on the .gov.uk website.

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/claim-tax-relief-on-your-private-pension-payments

Apologies if this has been covered before but there are bound to be some folk who may not be aware of this facility, especially at the beginning of a new tax year.

MiloP

Thanks for this. I’m currently trying to do this via the portal but I’m new to this and a bit confused about the figures to input. 

Where it asks for the ‘net amount’ of my contributions, is this just what I’ve actually contributed or should it include the basic tax relief already added by the pension provider? 

Thanks 

Dazed_and_C0nfused

MiloP said:

Thanks for this. I’m currently trying to do this via the portal but I’m new to this and a bit confused about the figures to input. 

Where it asks for the ‘net amount’ of my contributions, is this just what I’ve actually contributed or should it include the basic tax relief already added by the pension provider? 

Thanks 

If you are referring to relief at source contributions then you pay the net amount.

The pension company adds 25% to your net contributions to make the gross contribution.

Goober11

MiloP said:

Thanks for this. I’m currently trying to do this via the portal but I’m new to this and a bit confused about the figures to input. 

Where it asks for the ‘net amount’ of my contributions, is this just what I’ve actually contributed or should it include the basic tax relief already added by the pension provider? 

Thanks 

I'm with Interactive Investor (ii) so all I did was go into my Transaction History for the previous tax year and use the a search filter for Contribution. These are the contributions I made as either regular payment or lump sums from my salary that year. These are the net contributions I needed to add as they came out of my net pay.

Also worth noting that the contributions list on the Transaction History can be converted to something called a CSV and it can be saved as a PDF. The HMRC portal will want you to show some evidence of these payments so you can upload something similar from whoever your SIPP is with (I hope).

MiloP

Thanks, that’s really helpful.