How to view NI contributions
This guide takes you through how to find your NI contributions on your digital personal tax account.
So, what do we want to do? Well guess what, we want to login into your digital tax account! This will be into your personal tax account, so if you have a setup that automatically goes to your business account, scroll down to the bottom and you’ll be able to go to the personal tax account.
Follow this link to log into your tax account:
https://www.access.service.gov.uk/login/signin/creds
Input your government gateway ID, which is 12 digits long, input the password and click sign in.
Okay, so this is the screen that you might see initially:
Let’s have a look at your National Insurance record.
You can look at how much you’ve paid every year. If you’re not sure of your National Insurance number then you can get your letter from here. Or you can view gaps in your record, so let’s just have a quick look at that.
This person has 31 years of contributions (must be old!) and they still have 16 years to contribute before they can potentially retire. You actually only need 35 of full years contributions in order to get the state pension (that is of March 2021). Who knows – it may change in the future. They may say you’re not getting your pension at 68, you’re going to get it at 70 or 75 or 80, so you may end up having more years to contribute.
This page shows if you’ve got tax years there, and if they’re full or not full. If you go on to view details, you can look at see how that tax year is made up. I’m going to pick example years, going back a few years.
You’ll see here for the 2012-13 tax year this person had 52 weeks of self-employment, so a full year. For the 2011-12 tax year this person had some paid employment and a full amount of self-employment.
In the 2009-10 tax year this person had mostly paid employment, but in order to fill the gap they paid for five weeks worth of voluntary contributions. Voluntary contributions will fill up previous years, but you can only go back four years. If you have a year that is not full it should tell you how much you need to pay in order to make up that year of National Insurance. It is not necessarily the Class 3 National Insurance rate, which is something like £15.30 a week (a horrendous amount of money!), so if you are self-employed go for Class 2 and make sure you just pay it all up because it’s only £150/£160.00 a year.
If you need any further help and advice, please email info@performanceaccountancy.co.uk or call 01344 669084
DISCLAIMER:
The information contained in this document is of a general nature and is not intended to
address the circumstances of any particular individual or entity. Although we endeavour to
provide accurate and timely information, there can be no guarantee that such information is
accurate as of the date it is provided or that it will continue to be accurate in the future. No
one should act on such information without appropriate professional advice after a
thorough examination of the particular situation. Louise Herrington, Herrington Accounting
Services t/as Performance Accountancy disclaims all liability and responsibility arising from
any reliance placed on any of the contents of this article.
If you would like to talk to us about your accounting requirements, please book a call in my
calendar here and we can chat.