Tax codes in England and Northern Ireland

There is no E prefix and there is no NI prefix. If you live in England or Northern Ireland, your tax code simply has no letter at the front — it begins with the number, or with the letter that replaces one.

That is easy to read as an absence, and it is not one. A code without an S and without a C is a positive instruction to your employer's payroll: charge income tax at the rates for England and Northern Ireland, on the bands for England and Northern Ireland. The prefix is the field that selects the scale, and “blank” is one of its three values.

The three scales, and which one you are on

Look at the very first character of your code:

• No letter — England and Northern Ireland. Nothing in the code selects a devolved scale, so the code runs on the rest-of-UK rates.
• S — Scotland. An S code is one which effects deductions of tax at the rates set by a Scottish rate resolution of the Scottish Parliament under section 80C of the Scotland Act 1998 — a scale with more bands than this one, which is why Scottish tax codes do not translate into rest-of-UK ones by removing the letter.
• C — Wales. A C code is one which effects deductions of tax at the rates calculated under section 6B of the Income Tax Act 2007 — an arithmetic rather than a rate set directly, which Welsh tax codes sets out in full.

Which of the three applies to you is a question about your taxpayer status, which HMRC determines and then records in the prefix — or in the absence of one. Scottish tax codes and Welsh tax codes each set out what their prefix selects, and what happens to a code when the answer changes.

Why this site never calls it “the UK scale”

The regulations define the S code and the C code. They define no third prefix, and they do not define the England-and-Northern-Ireland case at all — there is nothing to define, because that case is what a code looks like when neither of the other two applies.

Where the naming comes from is HMRC's published table of what the letters mean, which is an administrative publication and not statute. This site's rate data carries it as a statement rather than as a blank: England and Northern Ireland codes carry no prefix letter, so a code without an S or a C is a rest-of-UK code rather than an unlabelled one. That is why the scale is named “England and Northern Ireland” on every page here, and never “UK”. The sources page sets out which statements on this site are statute and which are HMRC's naming; this one is naming.

The naming is not fussiness. A page that says “UK” when it means this scale is silently wrong for every reader whose code begins with an S or a C — and silently is the part that matters, because nothing on the page tells that reader it is not talking to them.

Every England and Northern Ireland code

These are the codes on this scale that this site decodes. Each has its own page with the regulation behind it and a worked example computed from the rate data, because they are different rules rather than the same rule with different labels.

• The standard L code — the one most people on a single job or pension carry. The digits are the yearly tax-free amount with its last digit removed; multiply them by 10 to get the amount back. On the full standard Personal Allowance and nothing adjusting it, that amount is £12,570.
• T — the same arithmetic as L, with a letter that records that HMRC is reviewing an item in the calculation rather than that a standard allowance applies.
• M and N — the Marriage Allowance pair, one receiving a transfer of a partner's allowance and one giving it. Symmetric on the payslip, and not the same kind of relief in law.
• BR — everything from that job or pension taxed at the basic rate, with no tax-free amount.
• D0 and D1 — the higher rate code and the additional rate code, each charging one rate on the whole payment.
• 0T — no tax-free amount, but the normal bands still apply, so the rate steps up as the income does. It is a digit zero, not a letter O.
• NT — no income tax deducted at all, and no repayment made against it either, which is what makes it different from a rate of zero.
• K — the one that adds notional income to your pay instead of giving you an allowance, with a cap on how much can be deducted from any single payment.

Any of them can carry a W1, M1 or X marker after it. That marker is not part of the code and does not change which of the codes above you are on — it changes the basis the employer works on, which emergency tax codes explains.

Where the rates themselves are

This page names the scale, not the numbers. The rates and bands for each of the three scales, for the current tax year, are rendered from the rate data on the tax-year page, with each scale labelled — which is the only safe way to publish them, because the whole point of the prefix is that the three do not agree.

Every UK tax code is the full list, grouped the same way.

This site is an independent UK tax-code explainer. It is not affiliated with HMRC, and the code HMRC holds for you is in its authenticated Personal Tax Account, which this site cannot see.