Salaries and PAYE Schemes
Why would I want a salary through my company when I can take dividends?
There’s a tax optimal set up where the owner-manager, assuming they’re not earning a salary (or other income) from elsewhere, should process a small salary each month and then anything more than that should be processed as dividends.
There are 2 main benefits to this:
- Declaring a salary of £758 per month over a year counts as a full year of national insurance
contributions, which helps you get the full state benefits, like state pensions. It is, however, just
below the secondary earnings threshold, meaning that you’ll be paying both Employee and
Employer NIC at zero %, so there’s actually no NIC to pay! - When you earn less than £9,096 as a salary in the 2024/25 tax year, there are no employee and
employer NICs to pay. This £9,096 roughly equates to £758 per month. Because there are no
NICs to pay, salaries below this level are the most tax efficient way of extracting money from a
company. Only after that amount do dividends become a more tax efficient way of extracting funds
than salaries.
How can my company process a salary for me?
For your company to ‘declare’ a salary, first the company needs to have a PAYE scheme. We can set this up for you.
What’s the steps in setting up a PAYE scheme?
If you let us know that you want to set up a PAYE scheme, we send you a few questions that we need
you to answer. Once you’ve answered these, we’ll set up the PAYE scheme with HMRC.
After that, HMRC should send a letter to the company giving two codes in a letter. You just need to take
a picture of that letter and send it to us. We’ll need this by the 24th of the month at the latest, in order for
us to process payroll for you in that month.
Once that’s done, your PAYE scheme is up and running. We’ll then process a salary for you each month.
What if I have other employees?
If you have other employees, the ‘optimal salary’ could be different from the £758 per month mentioned
above.
Give your CFO360 accountant a call or drop us an email so that they can discuss with you.
What if there’s more than 1 director on payroll?
This is similar to the ‘What if I have other employees?’ question above. If there are more than just two directors to be processed through payroll, then let’s discuss to find the optimal salary.
If there are only two directors, and no other employees, then the answer is straightforward: the optimal salary per director is £1,047.50 each month.
What’s the difference between ‘declaring’ and ‘paying’ a salary.
When we ‘declare’ a salary for you, we’re telling HMRC that the company owes you that salary. We therefore account for this through the directors loan.
As you already know, every time you take money from the company, we process it through the Director’s Loan Account.
Therefore, if we were declaring a salary of £758 per month, and you were taking £1,000 per month, your
Director’s Loan Account balance would be going up by £242 per month.
What if my company isn’t generating spare cash for me to take?
This actually doesn’t affect the fact that it’s still a good idea to process the salary through the company.
The reason being that as mentioned in the point above, we will just be adding the salary to your Director’s Loan Account balance.
Then, when there is sufficient cash in the company to settle the amounts that it owes to you, as director, you can take the cash out without any tax implications, because it’s already been ‘taxed’, albeit at zero %.
