To think getting less than 50% of your pay is crazy?

'If my slide deck is shit no-one dies' is going to become my new guiding principle at work.

They aren’t being very tax efficient. They should pay 27% into their pension which reduces their taxable pay.

Atrocious, really? The high income tax rate in the UK is lower than in most Western European countries (eg France, Spain, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries, Austria, Belgium, Portugal etc).

Marginal tax rates in this country are atrocious. They are kept high because.people like posters on here are envious of anyone who earns more than them. We would all be a lot richer if we stopped being jealous of other people’s salaries and aspired to matching them ourselves. There’s no chance of that though in a socialist country.

So £15k p/m is £180k a year. If repayment plan 1 (most likely) you'll be paying back about £14k a year in student loan. Which yes is a lot. BUT depending on your age the average loan for people on RP1 is between £15-30k. So even with interest you will have paid it off after about 3-4 years on that salary. Although realistically most people won't get that salary immediately out of uni, or even go from £30k to £180k in one swoop - they will have been on intermittent salaries of
£80k, £100k, £150k so the vast amount of people will have already paid off their SL before they ever get to that salary, and if they haven't they will with a year of it. Even if on R2 they will have accrued less interest as the earliest they could have possible graduated is 2015, so even with a £40k loan if you're on £180k within 8/9 years of graduating you'll pay it off by the time you're 30.

So SL will be a VERY temporary or non existent deduction and pension is entirely optional. Try again.

🎻

Boo hoo you have to pay a loan back that you took out.

What is the world coming to

Jealousy? Why do people think being critical of selfish people, moany people and/or obscene wealth is jealousy? Do people not normally call out this type of thing. I’m quite well off, very well educated, have no real wants that I can’t buy if I want but I find incredible inequality a terrible thing. And indeed I think any clever educated person does if they read decent literature or know about the world around them.

This ‘oh you’re just jealous’ screams immature stupidity to me.

It's really not unusual to earn less than 50% of your supposed salary.

It sounds ridiculous at first, but once you've paid higher rate tax, NI and pension, that's what youre left with. Because I was paying 13.5% in pension contributions it wasn't a surprise to see those figures

Its not like the pension disappears. They still have that money.

By the time you earn that much your student debt is typically paid off .

So many well-informed and intelligent comments here. From all directions. Surely we should all be able to see how difficult the choices are? I skew one nation Tory politically, and believe that business earns the money that politicians tax, spend and spread around, hopefully fairly. But I know there are levelling agendas too, which seek to flatten the field, so all end up equal.

However, no sensible person will take the risk of losing what they have worked for to create anything better if all the rewards are seized in tax.

Of course it always sucks when you earn a certain amount and have so much taken off. The more you earn, the more gets reducted, relative for all wages. I'm sure you'll agree that's still a might fine sum and part will be paid into a pension. I do understand it's a slap in the face though, but most of us can't really identify I guess. X

I am weeping for you!
It takes me 6 months to earn what you earn in a month! And I'm not lazy, I have 3 jobs, 1 NHS, and 2 well paid jobs as a trainer.
But as a household we're still on a low income so until last year we were entitled to about £200 a month tax credits.
This year we've switched to Universal Credits... Except we haven't because for years I've scrimped and saved and built up savings for a retirement and paid into a LISA, a scheme which the Government encourage! And I now have too much in savings to be eligible for universal credit! We should have just blown is all over the years and gone on foreign holidays, had takeaways, meals out, bought new clothes, the latest technology instead of being sensible.
So although my earnings are the same we're being penalised for being careful with our money and we're around £200 a month worse off and I can't save for retirement (I will but it'll mean cutting back more because saving for retirement is a priority in my eyes.)

So yes, I, and my tiny violin weep for you, and I agree the tax and benefits system is rubbish, but not in the way you think it is.

Hey! Look at me! I earn £180k a year, plebs!

Get real!

An interesting question .

however when we are talking about public sector workers salaries - teachers / doctors / nurses/ policemen etc etc - we never ask why dont they add on the Pension contributions their employer effectively makes to give them a pension for life based on their final salary - if we did we would quickly find out some of them are far better paid than OP !

The person in question is presumably quite young if they still have a student loan on a high salary of £180k a year so I’m not that sorry for them. I earn around that but am in my 50s after a long career. It does hurt a bit to see so much go in tax but I wouldn’t expect sympathy. I still have enough and consider myself fortunate to have a good job and to live here. (Also I take home more than £7k so is the payroll right for you/the person you mention?)

The entire point is that once over the threshold the amount you lose if you have children in other stuff means you aren't actually making more until you reach £130k I think it is. So may as well work part time and go back full time in the future/when you get promoted

When the loss of free childcare (on earnings over £100k) is added to the 62% marginal tax rate, and pension deductions, and maybe even some residual student loan deductions for younger ones, it's quite possible that they end up worse off by doing an extra day/shift, hence it's simply not worth it.

We also had the lifetime pension punitive tax cost, too, which meant that the likes of GPs were hit with a tax bill when their pension fund value breached the lifetime limits, which again, encouraged them to reduce working hours/days so as to reduce the amount by which their pension fund value increased.

Even if they're not "worse off" by working full time or extra days/shifts, there's a balance as to what the extra is worth compared with the opportunity of having an extra day off to allow them to do something else. When you're already earning well, you're not "desperate" to earn more as you can cope fine anyway, so if you only "earn" say 25% of the day rate for working an extra day, you may well think sod that, I'll have an extra day off - after all, it could mean they save on childcare, or dont' need a gardener, or don't need a cleaner, etc if they have a day off, meaning more savings!

High earners choosing to work part time to keep their wages below £100K only makes sense if they actually want to work part time. I assume that they will have less take home pay than if they worked full time, even with the higher tax burden?

I am surprised at doctors doing this to deliberately keep their taxes low when they, more than anyone else, can see the effect of underinvestment in the NHS.

Medical school places isn't the problem, it's the number of training places, and the number of senior positions (people in certain specialties end up in junior positions for far longer than they should due to the lack of consultant positions).

But this is all neither here nor there. We can improve the number of training spaces. That's something we can do. We just choose not to because six figure earners whine about having to pay tax, and people on 30k pretend like they're temporarily embarrassed millionaires. People should give unto caesar that which is caesar's (id est, pay your damn taxes and do it quietly. WWJD? pay tax. TWJWD.).

@QuickJadeUser

I do, to some extent, think that more part time doctors would go some way into fixing the health service: less stress for each doctor. More open positions for juniors to move upwards. Less of a bottleneck.

That idea only works if medical school places and training places are doubled to allow for every GP to work half a normal working week. What happened in reality is that the BMA refused to sanction a massive increase in training schools/places. It's not rocket science that training the same number of doctors as we did decades ago when they tended to work full time, in a time when they'll work part time, would cause massive shortages, which is what we're seeing.

These doctors could do years less schooling and go into finance/banking/consultancy, to make the same amount with less stress (because if your slide deck is shit, no one dies).

But they CHOOSE to be doctors.

Anyway, doctors choosing to work part time doesn't actually cause the problems you seem to think it does. It creates space for more positions. If 40 hours per week are budgeted for a position, and someone only works 20 hours of that budget, they can hire someone into the other 20 hours.

I do, to some extent, think that more part time doctors would go some way into fixing the health service: less stress for each doctor. More open positions for juniors to move upwards. Less of a bottleneck.

I trained for 6 years and then a further 4 for my charter badge and earn c£1.20 more p/h than a delivery driver. I’m well aware that my profession is not respected enough to get paid for that effort. Fine. I believe what I do is important and needed and I bloody well know you would notice if we all stopped doing it. But let’s not pretend that sustained hard, extra work equals high wages.

Why would anyone spend years of extra studying and low pay whilst training for the same pay as those on low wages??

There is a reason that some people are paid more, and it's usually recompense for extra years of studying and low/no pay to gain knowledge and experience.

No one would ever train for a decade or more to be a doctor if they were paid the same as Amazon delivery drivers!