Tax
How to keep your Child Benefit when you earn over £60,000
You had a good year, someone mentioned the sixty grand thing, and now there is a quiet worry that the Child Benefit is about to disappear. It is not, and the number everyone panics about is almost never the number that gets tested. Here is what is actually measured, the contribution that can move you back under the line, and the opt-out mistake that costs a partner their State Pension.
For UK sole traders · Checked against gov.uk on 23 August 2026 · About 7 minutes
Earning more never reduces the payment itself
Start here, because most of the worry comes from getting this backwards. Child Benefit is not means tested. However good the year is, the money keeps arriving at exactly the same rate, every four weeks, into the same account.
For 2026-27 that is £27.05 a week for your eldest or only child, and £17.90 a week for each additional child. Two children is £44.95 a week, or £2,337.40 across the year. Nothing about earning more changes those figures.
What happens above the threshold is a separate thing with its own name: the High Income Child Benefit Charge. It is an income tax charge that claws some of the benefit back through your tax return. The payment and the charge are two different events, and keeping them separate in your head makes the rest of this straightforward.
So at £62,000 you are repaying 10% and keeping 90% of it. The cliff edge people imagine does not exist, and there is no point at which earning another pound leaves you worse off overall.
The £60,000 is not your turnover, and not your profit
This is where self-employed people go wrong, and it goes wrong in the direction that causes needless worry. The test is on adjusted net income. That is not what you invoiced, and it is not the figure at the bottom of your bank statement.
For a sole trader it is built up like this:
- Start with your taxable profit, which is turnover after allowable expenses
- Add other taxable income: employment earnings, rental profit, savings interest above the allowances
- Take off gross personal pension contributions
- Take off Gift Aid donations
The gap between the first line and what people assume is large. A trade business turning over £90,000 with £30,000 of van, materials, insurance, tools and fuel behind it has £60,000 of profit, not £90,000 of income. Traders who hear "sixty thousand" and compare it to the money that came in are testing a figure that can be a third too high.
A pension contribution moves the line, and that is the whole trick
Because pension contributions come off in working out adjusted net income, they move the line you are being tested against. This is the most useful thing on this page and it is missing from most of what is written about the charge.
Take a trader with two children and £66,000 of adjusted net income. They are £6,000 over, which is thirty lots of £200, so the charge is 30% of £2,337.40, a little over £700.
Put £6,000 into a pension and adjusted net income becomes £60,000. The charge goes to nothing. The contribution attracts income tax relief at their marginal rate on top of that, so the same £6,000 is doing two jobs, and it ends up in their own pension rather than gone.
Whether tying up £6,000 until retirement is the right call is a genuine question with a different answer for every household, and it is one for an accountant or a financial adviser. The point here is narrower: the threshold is not fixed in place, and a lot of people who assume they are caught have a lever they have never been told about.
It is measured on one person, not on the household
The charge falls on one person: whoever has the higher adjusted net income. Only that person's income is tested, and the household total is irrelevant.
Which produces the result nobody quite believes when they first hear it. Two partners earning £55,000 each, £110,000 between them, pay nothing whatsoever. One earner on £65,000 supporting a family on that alone pays the charge. It has been argued about since the charge was introduced and it remains the rule.
For a trade household this matters in a practical way. If a partner does the books, the quoting or the scheduling, and is genuinely working in the business, how the business is structured and how income is split are real questions with real consequences here. They are also questions where getting it wrong has its own penalties, so they belong with an accountant rather than with a rule of thumb off the internet.
Opting out is fine, not registering is not
If you are well above £80,000 and expect to stay there, the whole benefit gets clawed back and there is an option to skip the round trip: keep the claim, decline the payments. No money arrives, no charge arises, nothing to declare.
That is a reasonable thing to do. The mistake is a different one, and it is expensive in a way that stays hidden for decades.
The people this catches are usually the ones being careful. They hear that they will have to pay it back, decide not to bother claiming, and only find out much later what the decision cost.
Self-employed means you pay it through Self Assessment
There are two routes for paying the charge, and which one applies to you is already decided by the fact that you are self-employed.
| Employed, no other reason to file | Self-employed | |
|---|---|---|
| Route | Can choose PAYE, through the tax code | Self Assessment |
| Do you file a return? | Not just for this charge | Yes, you file one anyway |
| Who calculates it | HMRC | HMRC, from the figures on your return |
| When it is paid | Spread through the year | With the rest of your bill |
The PAYE option exists for people whose only reason to complete a return was this charge. If you file because you are a sole trader, you stay in Self Assessment and the charge is worked out there alongside everything else. There is nothing extra to register for and nothing to compute yourself, though knowing roughly what is coming makes January less of a surprise.
What it actually costs, at a few income levels
Rounded to the pound, using the 2026-27 rates and assuming a full year of Child Benefit. Read down your income and across to the number of children.
| One child | Two children | Three children | |
|---|---|---|---|
| £60,000 or less | Nothing | Nothing | Nothing |
| £65,000 | £352 | £584 | £817 |
| £70,000 | £703 | £1,169 | £1,634 |
| £75,000 | £1,055 | £1,753 | £2,451 |
| £80,000 or more | £1,407 | £2,337 | £3,268 |
The bottom row is the full year of Child Benefit, which is the most the charge can ever be. Above £80,000 it does not keep climbing, because there is nothing left to claw back.
Two things worth taking from the table. The charge is smaller than most people fear in the lower half of the band, and it grows with the number of children, which is why the pension lever matters more the bigger the family.
The figure this all hangs on is your profit, and it is built from your paperwork
Adjusted net income starts from taxable profit, and taxable profit is turnover minus what you actually spent. My Job Goblin keeps invoices and expenses in one place as the work happens, so the profit figure is there when you need it rather than being reconstructed from a carrier bag in January.
This is general information about how the High Income Child Benefit Charge works, checked against gov.uk on 23 August 2026. It is not tax advice, it is not financial advice, and it cannot take account of your own circumstances. Whether to opt out of payments, make a pension contribution or change how a business is structured are decisions to take with an accountant or a financial adviser. For your own position, use HMRC's Child Benefit tax calculator on gov.uk or contact HMRC directly.