Figures › Income tax

Personal Allowance: taper rate

How fast the Personal Allowance disappears once income passes the limit — half of every pound over it.

0.5of the income above the limit
Corroborated Act of Parliament Great Britain in force since 2010-04-06

Checked against its sources: statute verified 2026-09-21·guidance verified 2026-09-21

Scope: Unchanged since 6 April 2010, and the OTHER half of a pair: the income limit this fraction applies above is Personal Allowance: taper income limit (£100,000) and the allowance it withdraws is Personal Allowance. The £125,140 at which the allowance reaches nil is arithmetic on all three and is not published as a figure of its own. Read the value as a multiplier on the EXCESS: a £110,000 income is £10,000 over the limit, so £5,000 of allowance goes. The effective marginal rate of 60% that commentators quote is the consequence of this fraction meeting the 40% band, not something any provision states.

Current sources

History

ValueFromToStatusSources
0.52010-04-06—Corroborated

Receipt

Everything above is reproducible and independently checkable — no trust in this site required (how verification works).

Figure ID
employment.tax.pa_taper_rate
Record fields (source type · unit · jurisdiction · status)
act·ratio_of_excess·GB·corroborated
Record hash (canonical JSON, SHA-256)
sha256:341c32ecac929758371d9361e2077b9b5cc0d011a9416a131a12024893c9d0fd
Source snapshots (SHA-256)
Legislation: sha256:18716a2432364b40772f94dd51494762f14de0012f7b838650f29ae26ae2978d
Official guidance: sha256:4c14ae255b4ce22d35141e68a6ec9d927301b8484e508b536fe4efa15941ae12
Listed in the signed manifest
release 3.0.0 manifest · record_hashes["employment.tax.pa_taper_rate"]
Machine-readable record
/v1/figures/employment.tax.pa_taper_rate · current only: /v1/figures/employment.tax.pa_taper_rate/current
Compiler's notes

An act carry whose touching note carries no date of its own — "with effect in accordance with s. 4(4) of the amending Act" — and the same note that inserted s.35(2) whole, so this row and Personal Allowance: taper income limit resolve through one document and share a date. The date was read from FA 2009 s4(4) ("The amendments made by subsections (1) and (2) have effect for the tax year 2010-11 and subsequent tax years") and is recorded in the block as resolved; provenance by an Act, so the carry holds. effective_from IS that resolved date — 6 April 2010, read from the archived /ukpga/2009/10/section/4 the resolved entry pins. The value is a ratio because the statute states a FRACTION: 0.5 is one-half of the excess, and a percentage would publish a "50%" the section does not contain and invite the reader to apply it to the allowance. No form of 0.5 appears in the section either — components() returns None for a float as it does for a bare int — so the locator is a hand-authored LOCATORS phrase read from subsection (2) itself, and the GOV.UK sentence is registered in B_EVIDENCE so the nightly re-checks the B side. The B page states the rule in money ("£1 for every £2") and never the fraction: it corroborates the RULE, which is what this record holds.