Martin Lewis' Top 'Tax Relief' Tip Could Get You £280 | This Morning

However, first you have been working from home

this

year, did you know that you can claim a few extra kilos for the piggy bank and those kilos

could

add up to quite a bit of money? So Martin Lewis is here to tell us more. Good

morning

, Martin. good

morning

, it's nice to see you both, how nice to see you, don't worry, I'm glad, I'm glad your heating is on Martin, we've all been working a lot from home now, but apparently there's a new tax break for Work from home. please tell us more marty well

relief

has been around for a long time but they have changed the way it works.

Let me talk to you about the basics first. This is for people who are employees and have had to work from home even for a while. Day, I'll talk more about that later, now let's go over the basics. The key is you must have had additional costs because you've worked from home, which most people have, you know, heat or electricity, you've had the lights on. You've had the heating on because you've been at home at some point, in which case you're entitled to an extra six pounds a week from your employer, which they don't have to give you, they can give you that and then that's tax-free income. which most employers don't give to people, and if they don't give it to you, then you can have six pounds of your current salary tax-free now, actually, you

could

have more if you had bigger expenses, but then you have To prove it the key to the six pound figure is that you don't need proof, you don't need to say that

this

is the extra amount that arose from turning on the heating or anything like that, it's a fixed rate as long as you and you know, don't do it fraudulently, you have been asked to work from home and you have had additional expenses, you can claim this, so that is the basics of how it has always worked, but there has been a change, so yes, because obviously if you are self-employed own, then you can continue with this, but I suppose this is not something relatively new in relation to pandemics, how do people go about claiming it?

So the big key was that it used to be you. I claimed that every week you had to work from home and then in the middle of last year I was quite surprised when I saw that hmrc had launched a microservice and I thought it was broken because if you go into that microservice, which is like something on the website hmrc you entered your details on this and even if you had worked from home for a day they automatically gave you tax

relief

for the whole year so I contacted them and told them if this was a mistake and they told me. no, it's not just because there are so many people working and out at home and not at home because of the pandemic, we're just going to have this micro service that means you're automatically going to get relief for the entire year and then we're wondering if that's the case.

I'm going to extend it to the new fiscal year because remember happy new fiscal year day, it's April 6th, so we just had it and they extended champagne, that's my life, so they extended it, so what does that mean now? is that if you didn't claim last year and even if you were only required to work from home for one day, you will get tax relief for the whole year, so if you didn't claim last year, you can claim last year. If you are working from home this year, as long as you have had additional expenses, you can claim this year.

If you did last year, you have to go back and claim this year's in the microservice because I've been talking wrong. about this for a while and two million people have done it because I've been everywhere saying do this, do this, do this, but this is new because you can also get these tax years, um, so that's the basics. , it only takes three minutes. free online help on how to do it how much is it probably worth saying well let's try to think about this if you pay tax at rate 20 you'll get relief of six pounds a week so that's six pounds a week of earnings that you're not paying 20 taxes, which equates to £20 a week for you, so a year's worth is worth around £60.

The value for two years is around £120. If you are a higher 40 rate taxpayer then you will receive £2 40. profit per week so it is worth £120 a year or you get £240 for two years so you know that is £120 for virtually any taxpayer At least if you're going to do the two years now, yes, can I? Ask what happens if you have costs over £6 a week. Can you claim more money without being greedy or anything else? Just asking for a friend. You can do it, but it becomes much, much more difficult if you are doing it because then you have to declare the expenses and you have to demonstrate what proportion of those expenses are due specifically to you working from home and you know that if two of you live at home and they both claim, then they both have to say that this part is due to me and this part is due to the other.

The only caveat here is that the only people who can't use the microservice are those who are self-assessed and do tax returns, so you have to do it on the self-assessment return that you fill out each year, but you're still entitled to the whole year, as I say there is a lot of free information available online, don't pay anyone to do this for you, it's only a few minutes on the hmrc website so it's worth doing, great Martin, will you join us later? I'm sure we'll have some questions about that, but for now, thank you very much, thank you Martin, thank you Martin.