Do I pay tax on a part-time job as a student?

The short answer

There's no special student tax rule. You're taxed exactly like anyone else, which is actually good news, because everyone gets a Personal Allowance of £12,570 for 2026/27. Earn less than that across the whole tax year (6 April to 5 April) and you owe no Income Tax at all. Above it, the basic rate is 20% on the bit over.

GOV.UK puts it in payday terms: you pay Income Tax if you earn more than about £1,048 a month on average, and National Insurance if you earn more than £242 a week.

Income Tax vs National Insurance

These are two different deductions, and they work differently:

• Income Tax looks at the whole year. If your tax code is the normal 1257L, your allowance builds up month by month, so a big summer month can still be tax-free if you earned little earlier in the year.
• National Insurance looks at each payday on its own. Earn over £242 in a week (or £1,048 in a month) and you pay 8% on the bit above, even if your yearly total is small. And unlike Income Tax, you don't get NI back at the end of the year.

Our lesson National Insurance: the other deduction explains what NI actually buys you (spoiler: your State Pension record).

Two real examples

Term-time job. You work 16 hours a week at the National Living Wage of £12.71 an hour (age 21 and over; it's £10.85 at 18 to 20). That's about £203.36 a week, or roughly £10,575 a year. That's under the £242 weekly NI line and under the Personal Allowance, so you'd typically pay no Income Tax and no NI.

Full-time summer job. You work 37.5 hours a week in July and August at the same rate: about £476.63 a week. On a normal cumulative tax code you'd likely pay no Income Tax, because your allowance from April to August covers it. But you are over the weekly NI threshold, so you'd pay about £18.77 a week in National Insurance. Not a mistake, just how NI works.

Starter checklist (it used to be the P46)

When you start a job without a P45, your employer asks you to fill in the starter checklist. GOV.UK confirms this form was previously known as the P46. It asks about your situation since 6 April, any other jobs, and whether you have a student or postgraduate loan and which plan you're on.

The statement you pick decides your starting tax code, so take thirty seconds to read it properly:

• Pick the statement saying this is your first job since 6 April (and you've had no benefits) and you'll usually get the full allowance.
• Pick the one saying you have another job and this one is likely to get the BR code, where everything is taxed at 20%.

Get it wrong and you may end up on an emergency code. That's fixable: see our guide to emergency tax codes.

Two jobs, one allowance

You only get one Personal Allowance, no matter how many jobs you have. HMRC normally puts it all on your main job and gives the second job a BR code. If your main job pays less than the allowance, you can ask HMRC to split it so you're not overtaxed on the second. Play it out in Two jobs, one allowance.

Getting overpaid tax back

Stopped working mid-year, or had tax taken that you didn't owe? GOV.UK says you may be able to claim it back, and points students to HMRC's tax checker. Use the HMRC app or your personal tax account, never a link in a text.

What about your student loan?

Your student loan doesn't count as taxable income, and you don't repay it from a part-time job while you're studying. Repayments only start the April after you leave your course. Our Plan 5 guide has the details.

Nation differences and other cases

The bit to remember

Students pay tax like everyone else, but on the normal £12,570 allowance most part-time jobs pay little or none. Watch the weekly NI line, fill in the starter checklist carefully, and check your code in the HMRC app. Everything else is in the work and tax library.