This is a div block with a Webflow interaction that will be triggered when the heading is in the view.
The UK tax year ends on 5 April, but most people never think about it until late March. For high earners and company directors, those final weeks are worth thousands of pounds in tax relief - or thousands lost to avoidable mistakes. This guide walks you through why the deadline matters, how to use carry-forward relief, when bonus timing becomes critical, and exactly what you need to do before the clock stops.
The UK tax-year end on 5 April is the final deadline to use your annual pension allowance and any available carry-forward relief. If you miss it, unused allowance is lost permanently. High earners must confirm their allowance, model income (including bonuses), and complete contributions before the deadline to avoid tax charges or missed relief.
The UK tax year runs from 6 April to 5 April the following year. It seems arbitrary, but it is absolute. Contributions made on 5 April count for the year ending 5 April. Contributions made on 6 April count for the following year. There is no grace period, no “working day” rule, no flexibility.
For someone earning £60,000, this deadline feels abstract. You might contribute £20,000 when you like - maybe you’ll do it in May after your bonus clears, maybe in September. The timing doesn’t move the needle.
But once you’re earning £200,000+, or running a company that generates significant distributable profit, that deadline becomes a choke point. You have:
Miss the deadline by a single day, and that relief is gone. You don’t get it next year. You don’t get to carry it forward. It simply disappears, along with whatever tax relief it would have generated.
The annual allowance for pension contributions sits at £60,000 for most people - meaning the tax relief-funded maximum you can contribute in any single year. But the system allows you to carry forward any unused allowance from the previous three years.
This is crucial. If you earned £60,000 and contributed only £20,000 three years ago, you had £40,000 of unused allowance. If you’ve done the same each year since, you might have £120,000 of unused allowance available right now - enough to make a £180,000 contribution this year without triggering an annual allowance charge.
But there’s a catch: you can only use carry-forward if you were a member of a pension scheme during the years in which the allowance was available. If you left a pension scheme and weren’t a member for a year, the carry-forward from that year is lost forever.
This trips up contractors and business owners regularly. You might have built up £80,000 of carry-forward while employed, then left a company pension. If you weren’t a member of any pension scheme for the next year, some of that carry-forward evaporates. You think you have access to it, then find out the hard way you don’t.
The first action before 5 April is therefore simple but essential: confirm with your pension provider exactly how much carry-forward you have available. This is a five-minute conversation that can unlock thousands of pounds of relief you didn’t know you had.
Once your adjusted income hits £260,000 (as of 2024/25), the annual allowance tapers. For every £2 of income above that threshold, your allowance reduces by £1. This doesn’t mean you can’t contribute - it means the relief you get is capped.
A £280,000 earner has £20,000 of income above the taper threshold. Their allowance drops from £60,000 to £50,000. A £360,000 earner is £100,000 above the threshold, so their allowance drops to £10,000 - the absolute floor.
For high earners and directors, this taper is lethal when combined with timing decisions. You might be at £240,000 of adjusted income, comfortable within the £260,000 threshold, until your bonus arrives in late March. A £30,000 bonus pushes you to £270,000, which taps your allowance from £60,000 to £55,000.
But that’s not the real problem. The real problem is that you made that contribution decision in January based on different numbers. You thought you had a £60,000 allowance. You made a £55,000 contribution in February. Now the bonus arrives and suddenly you’re over, and the taper means your contribution has cost you a tax charge instead of generating relief.
This is why bonus timing becomes critical before 5 April. You need to know what your final adjusted income will be - which means you need to factor in the bonus before it’s actually paid - and then structure your contributions accordingly. Sometimes that means making a larger contribution before the bonus lands. Sometimes it means delaying the bonus until after 5 April (which moves it to the next tax year). Sometimes it means accepting the taper and contributing less than your headline allowance.
The calculation is specific to your circumstances, but the principle is always the same: you need to model the taper impact before you commit to contribution amounts.
{{INSET-CTA-1}}
The Money Purchase Annual Allowance (MPAA) is a separate regime that catches people who have accessed their pension pot flexibly. The triggers include:
If any of those apply, the MPAA caps your future money purchase contributions at £10,000 per year.
This is brutal because it’s binary. You either fall within the MPAA (in which case you’re limited to £10,000) or you don’t. There’s no partial relief, no sliding scale. And the clock doesn’t reset - once the MPAA applies, it applies indefinitely.
For high earners, the MPAA is often a hidden cost of accessing their pension. You might retire at 60 and take £200,000 lump sum access to buy a property or fund a business. That decision was right at the time. But now you’re 65, you’ve wound down the business, and you want to contribute £80,000 from retained earnings - except you can’t, because the MPAA caps you at £10,000. That’s £70,000 of contribution opportunity lost every single year.
The MPAA decision is therefore one of the most important pension choices you’ll make. It’s not about this tax year - it’s about the next 20+ years. If you’re considering accessing your pension, you need to model what that access will cost you in terms of future contribution ability. Sometimes the cost of the MPAA is worth paying (because the access solves a real problem). Sometimes it’s not (because alternative sources of cash would serve better).
Before 5 April, if you’re within the MPAA, your planning shifts entirely. You’re not trying to use carry-forward or navigate the taper - you’re trying to deploy exactly £10,000 of contribution and making sure it’s correctly structured.
For company directors and bonus recipients, the weeks before 5 April are critical because bonus timing changes the maths of your entire tax position.
A bonus paid in March lands in your current tax year. That single payment:
A bonus deferred until 6 April, on the other hand, sits in the next tax year. It resets your income position and gives you a clean break to recalculate your allowances, your taper exposure, and your contribution strategy.
For a director earning £280,000, this timing difference can be the difference between an allowable contribution of £55,000 (due to taper) and one of £60,000 (if the bonus is deferred). That’s £5,000 of additional contribution you could make, worth around £2,000-£3,000 in tax relief depending on your rate.
But bonus timing also interacts with your company’s corporation tax position. A bonus costs your company the same amount in corporation tax relief as a contribution would - but a contribution is paid by the company on your behalf, whereas a bonus is paid to you personally. If your company has excess profits and you’ve already made maximum contributions, a bonus might be tax-efficient. But if you still have allowance available, a contribution is often more efficient.
The sequence that works for most directors looks like this:
Some directors reverse the second step - they pay the bonus early in the year, model the full-year impact, and then make contributions accordingly. Both approaches work, but the key is that the contribution decision is made with the full bonus in view.
If you’re using salary sacrifice (where you give up salary in exchange for an employer pension contribution), that arrangement must be in place before the contribution is made. You can’t make a contribution and then retroactively salary sacrifice - the relief doesn’t work that way.
This matters because salary sacrifice delivers National Insurance savings that direct contributions don’t. If you contribute £20,000 through salary sacrifice, both you and your employer save National Insurance. If you contribute £20,000 directly, you get income tax relief but no National Insurance relief for your company.
For a director, that difference is significant. If your company saves £2,000-£3,000 in National Insurance on a £20,000 contribution, that’s real cash staying in the business. But the salary sacrifice arrangement has to exist by the time you’re making the contribution. You can’t set it up in March and backdate it to cover contributions made in January.
The timing here is therefore earlier than the 5 April deadline itself. You need to set up salary sacrifice by mid-to-late February at the latest to allow time for payroll amendments and to ensure the documentation is in place before your March/April contribution.
Most high earners make one of four predictable mistakes as the deadline approaches.
The first is not checking carry-forward. You assume you have a £60,000 allowance when you actually have access to £150,000 or more. This costs you thousands of pounds of relief because you under-contribute.
The second is ignoring the taper until it’s too late. You commit to a contribution amount in January, then your bonus arrives in March and suddenly your allowance has tapered. You’ve over-contributed and triggered a tax charge.
The third is treating the MPAA as a future problem. You access your pension because you need cash today, without fully understanding what it costs you in terms of future contribution ability. The MPAA then eats into your retirement planning for the next 20 years.
The fourth is not sequencing salary, pension, and dividend correctly. You pay yourself a salary that pushes you into a higher rate band, then contribute what’s left. A director would contribute first, then take salary, then dividends - which often saves more tax overall.
Each of these mistakes is avoidable with planning that happens in March, not after the year has closed.
{{INSET-CTA-2}}
The weeks before 5 April should follow a specific sequence.
From mid-March onwards, confirm your carry-forward allowance with your pension provider. Ask for a letter or statement showing exactly how much you can access from previous years. If you’re unsure whether you were a member of a scheme during a prior year, ask your provider - don’t guess.
In the following week, model your full-year income. If you’re expecting a bonus, include it. If you’re a director, model your salary, anticipated dividends, and any other income. Calculate your adjusted income and work out what your taper-adjusted allowance will be.
The week after that, if you’re using salary sacrifice, confirm the arrangement is in place. Check with your payroll team that they can process the amendment by late March at the latest. Get confirmation in writing.
In the final week before 5 April, make your contribution. If possible, do this early in the week rather than waiting until 3-4 April. Pension providers sometimes experience delays in processing at year-end, so give yourself a buffer.
After 5 April, review the year. Calculate what you’ve contributed, check it against your carry-forward, and plan next year’s approach based on what you’ve learned about your income patterns, bonus cycles, and allowance utilisation.
This sequence takes about 10-15 hours of focused work (or a few conversations with an accountant). The relief it unlocks is often worth £3,000-£10,000+ depending on your income and available allowance. It’s the highest-return planning you’ll do all year.
The 5 April deadline is a hard stop, but tax-year end planning doesn’t end when the clock stops. It starts again immediately for the next year.
The patterns that matter, your income trajectory, your bonus cycle, your expected adjusted income, they repeat. If you’re a director earning £280,000 with a typical annual bonus, you’ll likely be in a similar position next year. If you’re a high earner accessing carry-forward, you need to plan what happens when that carry-forward runs out.
The key is to treat the deadline not as an annual event that catches you by surprise, but as part of a rolling planning cycle:
For company directors, this is especially important because your salary, pension, dividend, and bonus decisions are all connected. Get one wrong and it cascades. Get the sequence right, and you often find tax relief you didn’t realise was available.
The mechanics of tax-year end planning are not a mystery. The rules are published, the thresholds are known, and the deadlines are fixed. What makes the difference between capturing relief and missing it is having someone who can model your specific numbers, identify where the interactions create risk, and sequence your decisions before time runs out.
This is where working with a regulated wealth management firm like Skybound Wealth becomes valuable. Tax-year end planning sits at the intersection of pension rules, income tax, corporation tax, and long-term financial strategy. It is rarely just about one contribution or one allowance. It is about how all of your financial decisions interact in a single tax year, and how this year’s choices shape next year’s position.
Most high earners and directors who lose relief don’t lose it because they didn’t care. They lose it because nobody was looking at the full picture early enough. A structured conversation with a qualified adviser, someone who understands taper calculations, carry-forward mechanics, and director remuneration sequencing, is often the difference between acting with confidence before the deadline and scrambling to catch up after it.
The 5 April deadline exists whether you plan for it or not. The question is whether you’ll use those final weeks to lock in relief you’re entitled to, or whether you’ll look back a year later and realise your tax bill was higher than it needed to be.
Arun Sahota is a UK-regulated Private Wealth Partner at Skybound Wealth, advising high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth families, business owners, and senior executives with complex UK and cross-border financial planning needs.
This article is for information purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Tax rules, thresholds, and allowances may change. Individual circumstances vary. Professional advice should always be sought before making financial decisions.
Most high earners know they should be doing something before 5 April, but the interaction between carry-forward, taper, MPAA, and bonus timing makes it difficult to know exactly what. Arun Sahota specialises in pre-deadline planning for earners above £200,000 and directors with complex remuneration structures. A single planning session can help you:
The 5 April deadline is absolute. Relief that isn’t claimed before midnight is lost permanently. If you’re unsure about your position, a conversation with Arun Sahota now could protect thousands of pounds in pension tax relief
Ordered list
Unordered list
Ordered list
Unordered list
The 5 April deadline leaves no room for guesswork. Arun Sahota is a UK-regulated Private Wealth Partner at Skybound Wealth who advises high earners, company directors, and business owners on pension timing, carry-forward strategy, and allowance optimisation. A focused conversation before the deadline can help you:
