Marriage Allowance transfer benefit.
Tax saving
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Backdating (4 prior years max)
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Your breakdown
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A small allowance most couples never claim
Marriage Allowance lets one spouse or civil partner hand over a fixed slice of their unused personal allowance to the other. The transfer is £1,260, which is 10% of the £12,570 personal allowance rounded to the nearest ten pounds. The receiving partner then pays 20% less tax on that £1,260, worth £252 a year. HMRC estimates that hundreds of thousands of eligible couples have never claimed it, usually because the lower earner assumes it does not apply to them. This tool checks both incomes against the rules and shows the saving plus what backdating four years is worth.
The two conditions that both have to hold
The transfer only works when the giver has allowance to spare and the receiver can actually use it. Concretely, the lower earner needs income below £12,570 so part of their allowance is going unused, and the higher earner must be a basic-rate taxpayer with income between £12,571 and £50,270. If the higher earner is already into the 40% band, the claim is blocked, because the transferred allowance would not save tax at the rate the rules assume. A common mistake is a couple where one earns £9,000 and the other £58,000 trying to claim and being refused.
Walking through the default couple
Take the preset figures: a lower earner on £8,000 and a higher earner on £35,000. The lower earner is well under £12,570, so £1,260 of allowance is sitting idle. The higher earner is a basic-rate taxpayer, so they can absorb it. The £1,260 moves across and is taxed at 0% in the receiver's hands instead of 20%, which is the £252 the calculator reports. The backdating figure of £1,008 is that £252 multiplied by the four earlier tax years you can still reach, kept separate from the current year because you claim it as a one-off catch-up.
The annual £252 is the headline number, but the £1,008 backdating is where the real money sits. You can claim for the four previous tax years as well as the current one, so a couple who qualified throughout can pull back more than a thousand pounds in a single application. The chart below shows the current year alongside the four backdated years that make up the £1,008 catch-up.
Practical points the form does not warn you about
Apply directly through your HMRC personal tax account and it is free. Ignore the firms that advertise to do it for you and skim a third of the refund as a fee. Once granted, the transfer renews automatically each year, so you only apply once. Cancel it if your circumstances change, for example the lower earner returns to work and starts using their full allowance, otherwise they could end up paying tax they need not. There is one subtlety the form will not flag: handing over £1,260 of allowance can occasionally push the lower earner into paying a small amount of tax themselves if their income sits just below £12,570, so the household only gains where the giver's income is comfortably under the reduced allowance of £11,310. The receiver also has to have enough basic-rate income to soak up the full transfer, which a part-time worker on, say, £14,000 may not. In Scotland the saving still works because Marriage Allowance is a UK-wide rule, but the receiving partner must be a Scottish starter-rate, basic-rate, or intermediate-rate taxpayer rather than into the 42% higher rate, and the relief is given at the Scottish basic rate of 20%.
Questions people ask before applying
Can I claim if my spouse has died?
Yes. If your partner died within the last four tax years and you were eligible while they were alive, you can still make a backdated claim for those years. The claim is made by the surviving partner and HMRC processes it like any other backdated request.
Is it the same as the Married Couple's Allowance?
No, and people mix these up constantly. Marriage Allowance is the £1,260 transfer described here. The Married Couple's Allowance is a separate and far more generous relief, but it is only available where at least one partner was born before 6 April 1935. If you both fall after that date, Marriage Allowance is the one that applies to you.