Tax credit entitlement?

[champagneplanet]

I was hoping someone who is familiar with the tax credit system could help me. My DH took redundancy last year and luckily found a temp contract straightaway. That came to an end in March so he has just signed on for JSA, he is actively looking for a job.

I am expecting DC2 in June, currently work FT and earn approx £28,000 per year. We have no other income.

A work colleague has suggested we will be entitled to tax credits while is DH is not working, I assumed not as our earnings would be too high based on 16/17 but could we claim based on our current circumstances? I have a fair idea what my MAT pay will be so know my own earnings but can we actually claim as everything I've seen is based on previous years earnings which will be too high?

Don't want to appear grabby as I genuinely didn't think we would get a penny anyway.

Thanks in advance.

You are right in that if you opened a claim now you would be given a nil award based on last years earnings. However you can then ring them back with an estimate of this years lower earnings ( 2017-18).
However it will be tricky as you would need to estimate your mat earnings ( you can take off the first £100 of smp for 38 weeks I think ( please check that !) and it will be very hard to estimate your dh's earnings as obviously you won't know at what point in the tax year he will get a new job.
You need to be very careful that in this situation you don't end up with a big overpayment.

Also if he is claiming contributions based Job seekers allowance ( which I assume he is) I'm not sure if that counts as income for tax credits purposes.

Obviously if you return to work from mat leave earlier than planned because your dh hasn't found work, then that again will affect things.

Thank you, that was one of my concerns as hopefully he'll only be out of work for a little while.

I think I'll call them and see how the land lies, I assume I'll just have to keep them updated as soon as there's a tiny change, don't want to take it and then have to pay it back I might as well get by without!

The threshold for 2 children is around £32k assuming you don't pay childcare costs, so any income roughly above this for the year and you are unlikely to qualify. Sounds like with you off on mat leave part of the year and your dh not working part of the year you may qualify for a small amount.