National Insurance: what you can claim

This category is for the National Insurance you pay as an employer on your staff's wages. Your own contributions are personal taxes on your profit, and putting them here is one of the fastest ways to make a quarterly update wrong.

What you can claim

• Employer Class 1 National Insurance — on employees' earnings above the secondary threshold, at 15% on pay above £5,000 a year per employee (2025/26 rates).
• Class 1A National Insurance — on taxable benefits in kind you provide to staff.
• National Insurance on bonuses, overtime and commission — the employer share each pay run.
• Employment Allowance savings — up to £10,500 a year off your employer NI bill; most small employers qualify.
• Employer NI shown on your payroll report — the tracker should mirror what your payroll software calculates each month.

What you can't claim

• Your own Class 2 and Class 4 National Insurance — personal taxes on your profits, paid through Self Assessment.
• Class 1 National Insurance deducted from wages in an employed job — that's your personal tax, even though it appears on a payslip.
• Voluntary Class 2 payments — made personally to protect your state pension record.
• Penalties and interest for paying National Insurance late — never deductible.

Common mistakes

Recording your own Class 4 contributions here is the classic error. Class 4 is calculated on your profit after expenses — so deducting it as an expense would shrink the very figure it is charged on. HMRC simply adds it back, and your quarterly totals have told the wrong story in the meantime.

The second mistake is leaving employer National Insurance inside the wages category. It is a separate cost, and keeping it in its own category means your quarterly totals line up neatly with your payroll reports at year end.

Finally, check the Employment Allowance. Thousands of small employers pay more employer NI than they need to because nobody ticked the box in the payroll software. It takes a minute to claim and up to £10,500 a year off the bill.

How to record it in your MTD tracker

Select National Insurance and copy the employer NI figure from each payroll run. Leave out the NI deducted from your employees' pay — that is part of their gross wages, already recorded in the wages category.