Tailor your return 19 - Contribute to personal pension or retirement annuity

Payments deducted from your pay before it's taxed, the net pay arrangement

If your payments to your employer's occupational pension scheme, or any associated Additional Voluntary Contributions, are deducted from your pay before it's taxed you will already have received your tax relief. Do not enter anything on this return.

If you make contributions towards a personal pension or retirement annuity, or you made payments to an employer's registered pension scheme and no tax relief was given at the time of payment, select 'Yes', otherwise select 'No'.

Personal Pension

If you're a UK individual who is building up benefits in a registered pension scheme, you can usually have tax relief on your payments, your contributions or those of someone else, other than your employer, on your behalf, into that scheme.

You must either:

• have taxable UK earnings, such as employment income or profits from self-employment
• be resident in the UK for some time during the tax year
• have been UK resident at some time in the 5 preceding years and when you joined the pension scheme
• have earnings from overseas Crown employment, taxable in the UK, or your spouse does

If your pension contributions and other pension inputs are more than the annual allowance, you will need to work out the separate tax charge, more information is available in Helpsheet 345 - Pension savings. Tax charges on any excess over the lifetime allowance/annual allowance and on unauthorised payments.

Personal pension contributions that had basic rate tax relief in the scheme by 'relief at source'

Under the 'relief at source' system, your pension provider claims basic rate tax relief, of 20%, on your personal contributions and adds that to your pension pot. Enter the total amount, that is, your personal contributions paid to the scheme, plus the tax relief.

Include any one-off contributions you made in the year and enter the details of any one off contributions in the any other information section.

Use the pension certificate or receipt you get from the administrator the payment to registered pension schemes field or work out the figure by dividing the amount you actually paid by 80 and multiplying the result by 100.

If you pay tax at 40% or 45% you should still put the amount you paid plus the basic rate, 20%, tax relief. HMRC will work out the extra tax relief due to you over the basic rate claimed by your pension provider.

Retirement annuity

If you hold a retirement annuity contract and the retirement annuity provider does not operate the relief at source system, they do not claim the basic rate tax relief on your behalf, HMRC will work out the tax relief to give you credit in your tax calculation.

If you do not have any relevant UK earnings, do not enter any value in this field. For more information, go to the 'contributions' section of the Pension Tax Manual.

Payments to employer's scheme

If you made payments to an employer's registered pension scheme and no tax relief was given at the time of payment, you can claim relief for them now by entering the total unrelieved amount you paid in the tax year.

This may occur when:

• your contributions to your employer's occupational pension scheme were more than your earnings from that employment
• your employer was unable to deduct the contributions from your pay before taxing it, perhaps because your payment was made close to 5 April
• you are not an employee but you are a member of a public services pension scheme or a marine pilots' fund
• you are a member of an occupational pension scheme but contributions were made on your behalf by someone else, who was not your employer

Do not include here any personal contributions that had basic rate tax relief in the scheme by 'relief at source', such as a group personal pension scheme.

Payments to an overseas pension scheme

Put the amount that qualifies for tax relief in this box if you are eligible for:

• migrant member relief
• transitional corresponding relief
• relief under a Double Taxation Agreement