Hi everyone,

I'm new to this forum and have just been offered a PhD place starting September this year. It will involve a few teaching hours a week, for which I will be paid, and a stipend. I have a question that I'm trying to find a clear answer for, and haven't managed so far.

The teaching hours will be paid at £7380, plus the stipend will be £5000 - so £12,380 in total. I'm trying to work out what this means regarding my tax situation?

I know the £5000 is not taxed, but the teaching hours are. In total, it takes me above my taxable personal allowance, but is only the £7,380 taken into consideration when it comes to this?

So will I, in effect, not have anything deducted, because the taxable amount is not above my personal allowance? Or will I be taxed on everything above my allowance (£9,440)?

Very grateful for anyone who can give me an answer, without me having to phone the tax office! :-)

The student stipend isn't taken into account for tax purposes. Because your teaching income falls below the personal allowance for tax, you shouldn't pay any tax on it.

Are you a UK student or an international one?

The reason I ask is that standard UK research council studentships are in the region of £13-14K per year (more in London). That you have only been given a stipend of 5K and will expected to do (what sounds like) a fair amount of teaching in order to get any more suggests you are being somewhat short changed.

Do you have an agreement as to how many hours of teaching you will be expected to do? If you go above a certain number you may wish to consider whether a full time or part time PhD is best.

But in answer to your question, it sounds like your teaching earnings would be exempt from income tax as they fall below the personal threshold.

Thanks for the replies! Well good to know it's not likely there will be any deductions. Yes I'm UK (outside of London) and the PhD was an advertised one with allocated funding, where I was told the amount I'd be getting when applying. I had no idea this was low, though I'm thrilled to have been accepted. I'll be doing 6 hours a week teaching.

6 hours a week of face to face teaching, or 6 hours in total (prep, contact time, marking....)

Six hours face to face teaching per week :)

Others with more experience may be better able to advise, but I would estimate that 6 hours face to face teaching could well equate to 12-18 hours per week actual work depending on how much prep and marking you have to do.

I would definitely look into a small earnings exemption for some of your NI contributions, or you may find yourself rather short.

Hi there MissusMop,

Try this website for information on net wages after tax/NI http://www.listentotaxman.com/index.php

My advice, for what it's worth, is to call HMRC and talk to them about it. They are really the only people that can advise you properly. From my own experience, the law will be applied fairly depending on your personal circumstances, so it's better to know the true situation rather than spend time worrying about it. In my own experience, searching forums for advice on this sort of thing only leads to confusion and stress (that may just be my personality though!)

I hope you can get the information you need, and well done on getting the post!

Thank you so much for your replies and help - the tax office it is then :)

I understand where Apollo is coming from but I would be careful about calling the tax office. Their phone lines are not exactly staffed by experts and I know many a person given wrong advice. The advice on their own website is that PhD bursary is not taxable income, you only declare what is taxable earnings. However, a person on the phone lines often don't understand about bursaries and there have been other threads where the person on the phone has incorrectly entered it as income, once they've done that it's pretty difficult to get them to change the decision! The university should process the part of your stipend that is taxable pay on PAYE, this will do the tax for you (you won't pay any but it will generate a P60 at the end of the tax year and they should give you a pay slip for as proof of income - UNLESS they put you down as self employed, in which case you would inform the tax office of your taxable earnings, which atm is below the tax threshold.

Don't get me started, wowzers - in a previous job I contacted HMRC twice to say I didn't think my employers had got my paperwork right or were taxing me properly - I was twice advised it was all fine, and then got landed with a £1000 bill for underpayment of tax!

The last time I spoke to HMRC it was in connection with my part-time teaching work that I'm doing alongside my PhD. They were clearly only interested in my taxable income, so no bursary income was mentioned during the call - they just consider taxable income alongside your personal allowance. I wouldn't personally confuse the issue by giving them a bursary amount.

Agree, unless it's a vary basic enquiry, HMRC are pretty useless.