Money & tax

Four markets, three different answers, and one of them is genuinely strange. Britain runs 6 April to 5 April, which is a leftover from the calendar change of 1752 and makes no sense in any other terms. Australia runs 1 July to 30 June. America and Canada both use the calendar year. This matters more than it sounds if you move or work across two of them, because a single job can fall into two tax years in one country and one in another, and every allowance, threshold and band is apportioned against a year that does not line up.

Sources: Self Assessment deadlines, gov.ukTax years, IRS

It is what your employer applies when they do not yet know your position, and it usually means you get a personal allowance but no history, so anything you earned earlier in the year is ignored and you are overtaxed. It is not a penalty and nobody has decided anything about you. It ends when the right code arrives, and the overpayment normally comes back automatically in a later payslip once the code goes cumulative, without you claiming anything. What speeds it up is giving your employer a P45, or the starter checklist if you do not have one.

Source: Emergency tax codes, gov.uk

Almost always one of four things, and none of them is the arithmetic. Your code may not be the standard one, which changes the allowance before anything else happens. You may be paying back a student loan, which comes off after tax and is easy to forget. You may be in a pension scheme, and salary sacrifice reduces your gross so the figures stop matching from the very first line. Or you started partway through the year, which changes everything until the code catches up. A calculator models a full year on a standard code; a payslip models your actual year.

No, and treating them as the same is how businesses moving between the two get it badly wrong. VAT is charged at every stage and reclaimed by each registered business along the chain, so it only really lands on the final consumer, and a British business between two others is a collector rather than a payer. Sales tax is charged once, at the retail sale, and there is no reclaim mechanism because there is nothing to reclaim. It is also set by state and often by city rather than nationally, so two addresses in one state can carry different rates.

Source: VAT registration, gov.uk

Very possibly, and having an ABN does not settle it. The ATO position is that contractors paid mainly for their labour are eligible for the super guarantee, that it is calculated on the labour component of the invoice rather than the whole of it, and that this applies even if you quote an ABN and regardless of how much you earn. That last part is the old monthly earnings threshold being gone. So a sole trader mostly selling their own time can be owed super by the business engaging them, which is the opposite of what most people assume an invoice means.

Source: Work out if you have to pay super, ATO

It taxes it at two levels, which is not the same as twice. Federal rates apply everywhere, and your province or territory applies its own on the same taxable income, so the total depends heavily on where you live rather than only on what you earn. For almost everybody that is still one return, because the CRA collects both. Quebec is the exception and collects its own personal income tax, so a Quebec resident files a federal return and a separate provincial one, which is the single biggest administrative difference between provinces.

Source: Tax rates and income brackets, CRA

Once your taxable turnover passes the threshold in any rolling twelve months, yes, and the word rolling is the one that catches people. It is not the tax year and not your accounting year: it is any twelve consecutive months, checked every month, so a busy autumn can trigger it in November on a business that looks fine in April. You can also register voluntarily below the threshold, which is worth doing if your customers are themselves registered and you buy a lot, and is usually a bad idea if you sell to the public. The threshold moves, so the calculator carries the current one.

Source: Register for VAT, gov.uk

Three different numbers and people use all three to mean salary. Gross is what you are paid before anything comes off. Taxable is gross minus the things that come off BEFORE tax is worked out, chiefly pension contributions under a salary sacrifice or net pay arrangement, which is why your taxable figure can be lower than the salary in your contract. Net is what lands in the account. The one that causes arguments is taxable, because a payslip shows it and a job advert never does, so two people on the same advertised salary can be taxed on different amounts.

Usually yes once it stops being occasional, and the test is not how much you made but whether you are trading: buying to sell, doing it repeatedly, advertising, running it like a business. Selling your own old belongings is not trading however much you get for them. All four markets here draw the line in broadly that place and then apply completely different small-earnings allowances on top, which is why the answer to "how much can I earn before declaring it" is never one number. Keep the records from the start rather than reconstructing them.

A fixed penalty first, then interest, then penalties that grow, and the order matters because the first one is usually survivable and the later ones are not. The thing worth knowing across all four markets is that filing and paying are separate obligations with separate consequences. If you cannot pay, file anyway: a late return and a late payment are two penalties, and filing on time removes one of them even when the money is not there. Every one of these tax authorities would also rather agree a payment arrangement than chase you, and none of them offers one to somebody who has not filed.

Source: Self Assessment deadlines and penalties, gov.uk