If you:
- Pay the higher (40%) rate of tax in the UK (earn over £50,271)
- Don’t fill in a Self Assessment tax return (you pay tax automatically via PAYE)
- Made donations that you claimed Gift Aid on in this or any of the previous 4 tax years
You can claim back 25% of the before-Gift-Aid amount by calling HMRC[1], or writing to them by post[2]. You can also apparently[3] do it via online chat although I haven’t tried this myself.
I have personally called twice to report donations, once last year to claim for the previous 3 years, and once for the current tax year. Both times it was surprisingly easy. They just asked for my national insurance number, and the amount donated (before-Gift-Aid). They didn’t even ask for details of the individual donations, although obviously you should keep records of your donations in case you get audited, and you do have to give details if you are reporting more than £10k.
The 25% goes straight into your take-home pay (via adjusting your tax code), and this won’t happen automatically if you don’t contact them.
Further reading
This post is mainly to serve as a nudge for what I would guess is a common cause of losing money when donating, because of the manual step required. These articles are more comprehensive:
- The official advice from HMRC
- UK Income Tax & Donations by @harald, which covers more than this specific case
- The Payroll Giving topic page
I personally find it simpler to do it this way because:
Also I found ringing them up really quite straightforward, it took me maybe 15 mins each time.