Employer RSUs and capital gains tax

[RoundWeGoAgainAndAgain]

I get a bonus and RSUs every year, vesting every six months for four years. t's a US so the shares are awarded in USD.

I admit I understand very little of this and so have not touched the shares since I started there. The account has grown quite a lot of the last few years and I'm planning to use it as my pension, especially as I had a lot of years out of the workforce with kids and as a low earner. These are my concerns:

There have been a couple of not great PR stories that have caused the share price to fall, also Trump seems to affect the price a lot. I understand now that having all of my savings invested in one company is a bad idea.

I'm planning to start moving some of the money out and putting it in a more stable ISA.

So when the shares vest, the share platform automatically sell some to cover taxes that are owed. I think this is income tax?

And I know there is a £3000 limit on how much I can sell without paying CGT.

My question is - say I want to sell £3000 as soon as they vest - do I pay any tax on it other than the income tax that is automatically paid?

Is there a time limit after vesting that I should sell within to avoid any extra taxes? I have had some shares vest last week, if I was to sell £3k now, would there be any other taxes I would need to be aware of?

I do a tax return through an accountant so everything will be declared. I'm just not sure of how and when to sell. The share price is quite high at the moment so it seems like a good time?

The shares are either subject to income tax OR CGT, it won’t be both.

given they are an employment benefit it’s likely to be income tax and it sounds like they’re already giving you the net amount after tax deducted

if share price is high then yes it’s a good time to sell and invest elsewhere, could be AVCs into your pension or stocks or shares ISA or some other investment.

Why don't you ask your accountant?

‘And I know there is a £3000 limit on how much I can sell without paying CGT.
My question is - say I want to sell £3000…’

you don’t pay capital gains in the amount you sell. You pay it on the gain. Ie if you bought at £5000 and sold at £8000 that’s within you capital gains allowance of £3000

I think ideally you need them in an ISA so you don’t need to pay tax on the future gain now. Although that might be a bit like shutting the gate after the horse has bolted.

does your company not have guidance on how to manage the scheme and the afterwards. My company pays a third party to present to us the options / decisions / process after the scheme matures for us to make informed decisions. Surely yours at least has some documentation?

I had to look at this and my understanding is as follows (no guarantee it’s right though):

At the point the shares vest (i.e. the point at which they are awarded to you for you to use) they are treated as income tax and you pay tax on the value. The company will sell/keep some of the shares to cover this (mine is a US company as well and I found that they deducted enough to pay something like 47% tax so I got a correction in my following payslip as my actual tax rate in the UK is lower).

What happens next then depends what you do. If you sell the shares immediately there is no gain (as the price per share is the same as when they vested to you) so there would be no CGT to pay.

However if you keep them and sell them at a later date there is hopefully a gain (the difference in the price per share at sale compared to when they originally vested to you) and there may be CGT payable on that if it’s over your annual limit (currently £3k).