To be surprised by the difference in take home pay between 38k and 48k?

[0rangeCrush]

Recently I have looked into reducing my work hours by 0.2 FTE. This would knock £10k off my salary, but only £400ish off my take home pay per month.
This money would be saved through childcare costs anyway so I’d be no worse off for at least 5 more years.

Exactly.

Quite frustrating that Scottish people need to state that; like English is somehow the default.

I dropped a day and it was only a few hundred pounds difference. 4 days off a month and much better work life balance is definitely worth the loss in take home pay.

I'm NHS so dropping hours also dropped me down pension contribution bands when I went to 0.8FTE - conversely I increased it to 0.9FTE across 4 days and for all the rushing around it added it's not worth the extra each month. I'm going back to 0.8FTE in April!

Exactly. I intend to go to a toddlers group (not done this since I went back to work when my baby was 8 months!) and then give the house a blitz during nap time, watch some daytime TV, then nip to the supermarket on the school run to free up weekend time and stop the weekly stress of Saturday Aldi.

Mine drops my contribution a little but not much - I intend to bump it up by £100/month which is the money I save in travel expenses.

Scottish tax rates are the cause here. 🥲

Obviously you will lose out on your pension and the biggest down side about 4 days is you tend to keep the full time work load.

Blame Sturgeon, Humza Useless and the rest of them.

im Scottish, earn 55k and the SNP hate us high(er) earners.

So true about the Saturday shopping. It's the worst. And I always feel so sad for the poor screaming babies and toddlers who spend a week in childcare and then get dragged around the shops on their only days off

Which illustrates why we are seeing staff shortages, due to people working fewer hours when they realise they're not that much worse off. Financially incontinent politicians!!

Another example of scotgov's shrewd governance! We're crying out for nurses and teachers, you'd think it might've occurred to them that taxing people who are on relatively modest incomes (such as teachers and nurses) as if they're rich would just result in them cutting their hours.

This will be us in England soon enough, if we don't sort out the fiscal drag issue.

Yeah totally agree, it doesn't make sense for the extra day working.
You get 50% extra weekend (depending if you slice it that way) and lose 10% pay if that. If you go 50=>60k then you also get back the child benefit on top of the 40% tax bracket. And 100k if you're near there you also get the tax free child care.
Given the extra life balance it should be mandatory for all parents/carers (just kidding, but I'm sold on it!)

Income above the threshold is taxed so high, a lot of the time it is not worth it.

Talk about win-win! Lucky you op, I recently had to increase my hours due to my pay.

I understand why this is attractive in the short term. But you need to factor in the very real long term costs that are solely on you and not on your husband / partner. These are your lost pension contributions and your lost promotion opportunities.

Effectively you are taking money out YOUR savings and putting them into your partners. You will feel the impact of this later, especially if you are in that 33% of couples who divorce ( and that 95% of mothers who end up as effectively the sole carer ). Your living costs will be a lot higher and your income will be lower.

Surely the tax works the same for both partners? To be honest even childless and/or single people can go to part time as well. Spend more couple time as well as parent/child time.
Could be Friday= couple time
Saturday= mummy /child time
Sunday= daddy/ child time
Etc for two or more children.
Basically it can improve the whole family relationships

Yes of course both sexes can go part time so they can do unpaid labour for the Benefit of the family unit / children / elderly relatives .

Yet for some inexplicable reason it seems to be 99% women who do this and bear the cost. And men who continue to benefit.

its odd isn’t it .

The minute you mentioned £48k and that it made so little difference dropping to £38k, knew you were a Scottish classroom teacher. The £43,662 threshold for moving into the 42% tax band is a national disgrace, with fiscal drag, the people it hits worst are far from wealthy, and it's no wonder that people in this bracket are making these choices.

I think many many people in rUK don't realise that a Scottish taxpayer on around £50k pays ca £2k more in annual income tax than if they were resident over the border. And everyone earning over £28k pays more despite the sound bites from our first minister about most people paying less. That's only cos average wages are so shockingly poor. And the ratio of non-tax payers concerning for the future.

Oh I don't have the actual statistics, do you have a link?, in my case I'm on 28 hours a week and I know quite a few male parents in my department on 4 days a week. But my workplace is likely more progressive than average.
I was surprised at the official shared parental leave uptake figures because similarly in my workplace most of the partners seem to take a few months

It was ever thus on MN OP. It's a big frustration of mine even though I now live in England.

I earn less than you and with childcare costs I was actually paying to go to work on Fridays, I’m now better off working 4 days a week, which is fine by me.

My husband has cut one day a week for a similar reason. It means a significant amount of the cleaning and tidying and batch cooking gets done on his day off. I wfh and we usually manage lunch together that day too.

Fortunately my kids are not really in childcare except school and then 1.5 days per week. But yeah, I’d like to go to the zoo or something at the weekend instead of Aldi.

On the plus side, people will get the long yearned for improvement in work life balance.