Combining employment and self-employment

[Jokat]

Hi there,
I am self-employed, working with autistic children. One of my clients is going to start mainstream primary in September and the school and parents want me to be his part-time one-to-one TA. I would be employed by the school and paid a TA salary, and the family will top up my salary to meet my hourly rate.
I worry that this is going to get really complicated. Would it not cause havoc with my next tax return? Also, how would HMRC work out how much tax to charge me if the school pay me a gross salary? I don't want to make a mistake and end up in burocracy hell by mixing the two statuses, as I would still be self-employed working with other clients at the same time ...

It’s really not so bad. I’m employed 0.6FTE (3 days pw) and self-employed the rest of the time. You just do your tax return as normal but include the info from your P60 that you’re given by your employer (usually already auto-populated anyway as HMRC gets sent your P60 info directly from the employer too).

The only thing to watch out for is the tax code they assign you for your PAYE role. How many days will you be employed? You just need to decide where you want your tax-free allowance allocated to (employment, self-employment or split across the two) and ensure they issue the tax code accordingly. But that’s all much of a muchness anyway as it all gets evened out at the point of the tax return.

You’ll be fine!

Thank you very much for that! Knowing this makes it less daunting
I'll be doing 12 hours a week with them, across 2 or 3 days.

If it’s only 12 hours then I’d probably get your tax-free allowance allocated to your self-employment income and get them to put you on basic rate (code BR) for your PAYE role.

You are a star! Is that something I need to ask the school to do? Or approach HMRC directly? It's been so long since I've had to deal with a PAYE code, I can't remember

HMRC issues the codes to your employer so you need to call them. Chances are they’d automatically put you on BR anyway, but always worth checking to save the hassle of changing it after a month’s pay on the wrong code.

I'm SE and PAYE and I do exactly that with my tax

Thank you!

I have done self-employed and employed for years. It’s easy. You just need to add an extra page on your tax return and keep your P60’s so you have the details to hand when you fill it in.