Income Tax and National Insurance 2008

So having calculated everything purely for Income Tax what happens if I add in National Insurance contributions (Class 1 NICs only).

The first problem lay in the fact that the HMRC publish the bands weekly, and no you can't just multiply by 52, so I had to scrounge up some annual bands, then I made a miscalculation. It's difficult to check as the HMRC's online calculator is still not working for this year so I had to locate another which showed up my error and I corrected it to suit (still disagrees, but the error is insignificant). So here's the new combined Income Tax and NI chart for 2008/09

I believe the correct expression to use is "What the hell happened in the middle?" the answer is quite amusing. At the lowest middle point between £39k and £40k you are paying £466.30 less in Income Tax, but with the change in NI you're paying an extra £474.90 in contributions; so overall you're earning less. Still sucking the money out of the poor (hey just claim it back in Tax Credits thus, as The Devil's Kitchen points out, being dependent on the state deciding if you're eligible for the money you've earned)

Just to make life easier for others trying to work everything out the Income Tax bands for 08/09 are: allowance of £5,435; 20% up to £36,000; 40% over. And the Class 1 NIC's in the same style are: allowance £5,435; 11% up to £40,400; 1% over (although they don't put it like that to just to make it harder to work out).

Last year was: allowance of £5,225; 10% up to £2,230; 22% up to £34,600; 40% over. NICS: allowance £5,225; 11% up to £34,840; 1% over.