SE23150 - Car benefits: accessories provided after the car is first made available

Section 168A(12), Section 168B and Section 168C(1) - (2)

Before reading the text that follows this paragraph, ensure that you are familiar with

• the general introduction to the calculation of price of a car as regards a year at SE23100
• the flowchart setting out the steps involved in calculating the price of a car as regards a year at SE23100a.

Accessories which are included in the list price or notional price are those accessories which were made available with the relevant car at the time the car was first made available for private use to the employee or to a member of his family or household. That means that the price calculated following the steps in SE23101 onwards will be fixed as long as that employee has the benefit of that particular car.

However for any particular year, the price of the car as regards that year may be increased by the price of certain other qualifying accessories. The accessories to be included are qualifying accessories which

• were not available with the car at the time it was first made available to the employee
• were first made available with that car after 31 July 1993, and
• had a price of £100 or more.

The price of those particular accessories is then added to the price of the car, as calculated under SE23101 onwards. The price of the accessory for these purposes is either its list price or its notional price as explained at SE23132 onwards.

It should be noted that accessories added after the car was first made available change the price of the car as regards the year. This means that an accessory added half-way through the tax year will change the price of the car for the whole year and not just for the period after that accessory has been added (see example SE23187).

The lower limit of £100 means that employers need not return the price of inexpensive accessories which are made available during the period when the employee has the use of the car. However, you should not accept that a set of items could be divided for this purpose so that each item has a price of less than £100 - for example, a set of four alloy wheels with a total cost of £300 could not be treated as four separate wheels each with an individual cost of £75.

See example SE23185 for an example of how the price of a car is calculated – including how accessories are taken into account.