The child tax credit withdrawal, taking effect on Monday, will lead to marginal tax rates of over 100 per cent on families with more than eight children earning between £50,000 and £60,000.
The IFS explains how the marginal rates are calculated:
Affected taxpayers will pay back one per cent of their family’s Child Benefit for every £100 by which taxable income exceeds £50,000. One per cent of Child Benefit is £10.56 per year for a 1-child family, and an additional £6.97 per child for larger families. Hence the marginal tax rate between £50,000 and £60,000 is increased by about 11 percentage points for the first child and by an additional 7 percentage points for each subsequent one. So, for example, while about 320,000 people will find that their marginal income tax rate increases to more than 50%, about 40,000 of them – those with three or more children – will find that it jumps to at least 65%.
They offer a chart with the rate calculated up to four children:
By seven children, the marginal rate rises to 99.35 per cent, and by eight, it breaks 100 per cent (106.32 per cent, to be exact). This means that any individual with a family of eight kids earning between £50,000 and £60,000 would be better off if they reduced their salary back down to £50,000. In fact, for that individual, they would have to earn £61,105 before their post-tax income was the same as it was at £50,000.
It’s unclear whether any families actually exist matching that criterion – rather wonderfully, my back-of-the-envelope maths (which assumes that the exponential decrease in the number of families of each size continues: e.g., there are 1/8th the number of families with three or more kids as there are with two or more, so I’m assuming that there are correspondingly 1/8th the number of families with four or more as there are with three or more, and so on) suggests that there may be exactly one – but even if there are none at the moment, there’s no reason why there won’t be one in the future. Families with eight children do, after all, exist.
In fact, as time goes on, this problem will get worse. The IFS points out that child benefit is uprated with inflation, while tax bands aren’t. Currently, each extra child after the first increases your “marginal tax rate” by around seven per cent, but suppose child benefit is uprated by two per cent a year. In that case, the marginal tax would exceed one hundred per cent for families with seven children next year; for six children in the year 2020; for five children in the year 2028; and, eventually, for families with just one child – i.e., every family – in the year 2076.
Hopefully the law will be changed before then, of course. But as a rule of thumb, laws which become ridiculously damaging unless you actively intervene ought not be signed in the first place. Oops.
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