What about summer jobs or even Saturday jobs?
If you have a part-time job at weekends or in the evenings, you will still have to pay tax and National Insurance contributions on whatever you earn – if it works out at over £5,035 a year for tax or more than £97 a week for National Insurance. That means that if you’re earning less than £97 a week, you won’t have to pay any tax or National Insurance contributions.
If you work in the holidays – and remember that’s Christmas and Easter as well as summer - you’ll have to pay tax if you earn more than £5,035 over the tax year and National Insurance every time you earn £97.01 or more a week.
It’s unlikely that you will earn that much. However, there is a possibility that your boss might automatically take the tax off your wages each week anyway, and you don’t want that! Of course you can claim it back afterwards, but then you’d have to wait to get your hard-earned cash back. To avoid that happening, make sure you get one of these from your employer – a form P38(S).
If you fill it in and give it back to your employer, you’ll get paid everything you’re supposed to. This form is specially for holiday jobs only - if you’re doing a part-time job during term and then do a holiday job as well, you can’t use a form P38(S).
If you can’t use form P38(S) because you work in term time as well as the holidays, and you think you might have paid too much tax you’ll want to investigate getting your money back. You can check whether you might have paid too much by using the student tax checker. The tax checker also tells you how to go about getting a repayment.
