National Insurance Costs for Locums
Many locum doctors will often have at least two sources of income. It is common for locums to have:
- Self employed locum income.
- Salaried income from a hospital, PCT or doctors surgery.
Both these sources of income are liable to National Insurance Contributions (NIC’s). A locum doctor will pay NIC’s on their self employed income as well as NIC’s on their salaried income.
There is, however, a maximum amount of national insurance contributions which any individual tax payer has to pay in any year. Often a locum doctor will have paid the maximum national insurance contributions due on their self employed income alone.
Making sure you don’t pay too much
It is not uncommon for the significance of this maximum limit to be missed by an inexperienced or non-specialist accountant. If the accountant does not request that the national insurance contributions are refunded, the locum doctor will pay more national insurance than is due.
The Inland Revenue has no procedure to prevent this from happening and it would not be unusual for a locum doctor to pay £1,500 per annum in unnecessary contributions.
Paying extra gets you nothing, there are no additional benefits for these additional contributions.
How we can help with National Insurance
One of the first things that we will do when appointed to act for a locum doctor is to check what National Insurance Contributions are being paid and ensure you are not overpaying.
Better still, if the contributions have been overpaid in the past, we are able to reclaim the overpayment (going back up to 4 years).
For many of our locum doctor clients we obtain significant refunds of national insurance on an annual basis.
