Hi Folks,
Over the last few days I have singed up with a few agencies to get as much experince & work as possible. Just wondering where this leaves me with the good old tax man? Do I have to choose 1 as my main employer and the other 2 as secondary jobs? Will I have to pay emergency tax on the other 2?
Many thanks
Assuming they all pay you via PAYE and not some umbrella or other tax avoidance scheme then yes, it’s the same as anyone who has more than one job. One of them gets your tax allowance and the others pay you at BR (also known as emergency tax). If at the end of the tax year you haven’t done enough work at the “main” one to use up all your tax free allowance you can claim a refund from the revenue.
HTH,
Paul
Ok many thanks 
Don’t allocate your tax code to any agency NOT doing PAYE.
Example:
Agency One (Designated by you as main employer) This one has your tax code, BUT as a result you’ll be able to deduct less expenses, since you’re paying less tax in the first place. Make sure your main firm is ideally the local one giving you local work. This will likely be the main work you’ll get, but be careful not to spend more than 40% of your working time with the same client. Ask the agency to give you work at 3+ clients over the year ideally. An example 3 clients might be TNT, Tescos, & Stobarts.
Agency Two (Also PAYE, but work is very bitty) Better hourly rate, but you have to commute for instance. Pay the emergency tax, and have a bigger taxed amount you can deduct milage from. 
This might be the work you get during the school holidays. Example clients here might be MrCT, Langdons, or Samworths. 
Agency Three (Inisists you go ‘umbrella’, meaning it’s NOT paye even if they lie and say it IS! 
) Use this firm only for top-dollar work eg. £13ph plus stuff, or £18ph if you have ADR. Effectively, this will probably price you out of the market, but who cares? - They lose more than you do if you don’t get any work from them, as you’re effectively paying per shift to work there. Top dollar makes it worth-while, but you’re only likely to find yourself getting last-minute bank holiday cover or being phoned up sunday afternoon to cover a sunday night sickie, and the like as I’ve found. Examples here might be Weekends & Bank Holiday sick cover at Morrisons, Iceland, or Co-op.
As long as you don’t spend more than 40% of your time working out of the same depot, you can claim milage. If you get all your work from only one or two agencies on the other hand, then it is highly likely that you’ll be sent back so often to the same old clients, that you ARE there more than 40% of your working year, and will fall foul of HMRC - so why do it? 
Have 3+ agencies under your belt at all times, even if you get hardly any work from one of them!
The over-tax you paid throughout the year means you get a nice tax rebate set up around about now. You’ll need to contact them with your gross taxable to date amounts from any agencies you have worked for over the tax year just finished, and they should do the rest. HMRC are a lot easier to deal with by phone these days than they used to be.
If you get tax credits, you’ll need to also set up a final lump payment (them to you!) when you have your final aggregate total “taxable gross to date” for the year too. Tax credits are done on a different number at HMRC, but is well worth the effort.
The lump sum comes from the fact that you declared your estimated earnings for the year earlier on, hopefully over-estimating your total. Your final figures will be reduced by the expenses credits, and your tax code to give you the “real” total which should hopefully be well under your estimate (because you didn’t know what expenses in advance to knock off right?) 
Eg. Your earnings to date might be £17,000 less the expenses & tax code which leaves you £9,300 taxable for the year.
You declared however £10,500 taxable for the year, so the Tax credit department send you a lump sum of around £350, and you’ll get a tax rebate of whatever you paid at the OTHER non-main agencies throughout the year. Thus, if you didn’t do much of that stuff, you’ll not get much of a rebate, but you should still get something. You might get as little as £250, or as much as £1200 with the figures shown above for example. All worth doing however, as anything HMRC send you is in itself tax-free, so it is effectively “free money” which has got to be the most popular kind for anyone I would have thought!
I have a full time job and one agency I do a bit for. Even though I filled in the p46 and declared it as a second job they are taxing me using my tax code. As are my full time job. Keen to avoid a bill I spoke to the hmrc helpline and their advice was to keep 20% of my earnings to one side as I would probably get a bill once the p60s had come out.
Wow that is some great advice there thanks very much! The more we can claw back from the gov the better!!
starfighter:
I have a full time job and one agency I do a bit for. Even though I filled in the p46 and declared it as a second job they are taxing me using my tax code. As are my full time job. Keen to avoid a bill I spoke to the hmrc helpline and their advice was to keep 20% of my earnings to one side as I would probably get a bill once the p60s had come out.
How did they do this, when you didn’t provide them with your tax code?
Have you let them “just assume yours is the going rate one”? (A trick used by umbrella firms to make your pay look meatier than it would with their extra deductions on it otherwise!)
They’ve done this for their benefit - not yours. If there are any expenses paid, the ceiling is a lot lower if your full tax code is applied, hence why I stated above that the best place to use your tax code is a local agency employing you at local depots. There’s not much mileage to be had from such local work, meaning you don’t lose out. 
A top-dollar job where you commute on the other hand works out better if you claim that meaty mileage against emergancy taxed wages. That way you’re effectively using HMRC as a moneybox for the end of the tax year!
Clawing back what you’ve paid over the years isn’t scrounging. Claiming what you’ve never paid into is scrounging.
Id the same as ou star fighter… The agy sent me a p45… Spoke to our accountant and was told to send him everything and he will sort it out for me… Thought it was a result… I live with two accountants and just it be my luck that when im on holiday the 2 of them have ■■■■■■ off out the country n wont be back for two weeks so will have to leave them a note to sort it out when the tax yr ends
you can split your tax code between two employers, but i’m not sure about any more.
let’s say your present tax code is 7500.
you can get 2 new codes at 3750.
your employer will tell you that it can’t be done, and the tax man will tell you it can be done, but your primary employer is expected to sort it.
so, it’ll take a few calls, but it’s down to the tax man to sort it. don’t expect them to do it on a monday or friday.
Well for what I do on the agency it isn’t worth claiming any expenses or shifting my tax code. I just keep it all at my main job and will just pay the bill as of I was self employed.
As long as you don’t spend more than 40% of your time working out of the same depot, you can claim milage. If you get all your work from only one or two agencies on the other hand, then it is highly likely that you’ll be sent back so often to the same old clients, that you ARE there more than 40% of your working year, and will fall foul of HMRC - so why do it?
Where do you find this information from■■?
You can either visit the HMRC website, or just ask the very helpful staff when you phone up.
I’ve got a different person answering each time I call, but they all tell me the same things, because I too have had my doubts about some of the “too good to be true” info at times.
Here’s what they’ve told me of late that applies to others as well:-
(1) Tax credit claimants will need to do at least 100 hours a month from the start of the new tax year in order to achieve the 25 hours per week rolling average now required. I’ve NOT found out yet if “working less than 25 hours as opposed to 16 last year” now counts as “unemployed” for that week, as there is a big grey area here is there not?
(2) Income tax rebates will not be processed yet. Submit your totals by phone, or wait until your P60 arrives as per usual.
(3) If your tax code is wrong, GET IT SORTED STRAIGHT AWAY by phoning up and ASKING! Mine was incorrectly a K code when it should have been a normal one - scary! HMRC had got some crossed wires thinking I’d earned £43k for last year, and my 2012-13 tax code was set as a K code to reclaw back all the tax credits I’ve been getting. They thought I was doing agency work AND still doing my old full time job from 2010!
(4) Expenses: You cannot claim expenses for what HMRC defines as “normal commuting”. Only places of work where you spend less than 40% of your working hours are classed as “temporary workplaces” for mileage purposes. This means that as an agency you must be working at AT LEAST 3 different locations per year on a regular basis in order to be able to claim mileage for all of it, as I do.
Temporary workplace, 40% rules, mileage, etc.
Sublinks are provided for the hard-of-clicking. 
starfighter:
Well for what I do on the agency it isn’t worth claiming any expenses or shifting my tax code. I just keep it all at my main job and will just pay the bill as of I was self employed.
If what you do at the agency is over £1000 a year, then if you get tax credits like I do, then it IS worth claiming against, as it also reduces your gross pay to date for the purposes of getting extra tax credits. 25-40p in the pound isn’t unusual here, so for every £1000 in mileage/meals claimed over an entire year for example, would net you an extra tax credit lump sum of £250-£400 around about this time of the year - once you’ve submitted your “gross taxable pay to date” totals for all jobs by phoning them and telling them of course!
£250+ of free money? - Nah! Shan’t bother filling in about 4 forms a year and spending half an hour on the phone to get THAT! 
limeyphil:
you can split your tax code between two employers, but i’m not sure about any more.
let’s say your present tax code is 7500.
you can get 2 new codes at 3750.your employer will tell you that it can’t be done, and the tax man will tell you it can be done, but your primary employer is expected to sort it.
so, it’ll take a few calls, but it’s down to the tax man to sort it. don’t expect them to do it on a monday or friday.
Extra paperwork, Extra hassle, and all for NO extra free money. I wouldn’t bother. 