Sharing salary with your partner

Life hack

If you’re not a shareholder or business owner you’re generally limited in the ways in which you can save tax, as you have little control over your income and you can’t give away a stake in the business to split your income with your significant other.

It is possible to personally pay your partner from your salary and claim a tax deduction for it. That is, if they are willing to work for it, and the two of you are willing to work with each other.

Allowable expenses

To do this you need to get around the general tax rules for job expenses. These preclude a tax deduction unless you are “…obliged to incur and pay it as holder of the employment, and the amount is incurred wholly, exclusively and necessarily in the performance of the duties of the employment”.

Obligations

To legitimately claim a tax deduction in these circumstances you must have an obligation to pay your partner and the payment must be required as part of your duties as an employee/director. HMRC’s internal guidance says that there are only two situations in which it will accept a claim. They are where the employee/director:

• is paid by results, e.g. commission for sales; or
• their duties include a requirement to pay assistants to help with their work.

HMRC will disallow a deduction if the payment is excessive or hasn’t been physically made. This means that you must pay the going rate for the work they’ll be doing and transfer the correct amount to them.

Personal assistant

Your assistant, whether that’s your partner or someone else, must be required to carry out work that’s necessary for the proper performance of your role in the company. This could cover, e.g., secretarial help, bookkeeping, market research, credit control, general admin. The possibilities largely depend on the nature of your role.

Contractual requirement

For this to work you’ll have to persuade your fellow directors to amend your director’s service contract to require you to engage an assistant where necessary to help with your work. Ideally it should specify the type of work which the company is happy for you to contract out to an assistant.

NI issue

If you employ your partner, or anyone else for that matter, you need to consider the NI implications.

If you employ your partner and pay them more than the NI secondary threshold (£96 per week for 2025/26) you will have to pay NI at 15%.

To save NI, your partner could work on a freelance basis. This works well if your partner has little or no other income so that whatever you pay them is tax and NI free. If you’re a 40% taxpayer this could save you £400 for every £1,000 you pay to your partner.