Residual income is the net amount of declared income used to determine the contribution to your means-tested bursary award.
To calculate this, your parent, civil partner, or partner's gross taxable income for the previous financial year is used. For the 2016/17 academic year, the applicable financial year will be the period running from 6 April 2015 to 5 April 2016.
Certain allowable expenses are deducted from this to give the 'residual income'.
The allowable expenses we can take into account against the income are:
- employee pension contributions, if they attract tax relief
- personal pension contributions, if they attract tax relief
- loan interest - if allowed for tax purposes, this is for self-employed persons only
- professional subscriptions and any other tax relievable expenses
- superannuation attracting tax relief, up to 15% of total gross income
- retirement annuities, up to 17.5% of total gross income
- payments into a private pension scheme
We may also take expenses such as stakeholder pensions into account as an expense if they’re shown on your P60 or payslip.
Although domestic help is requested as an expense on the application, this is no longer taken into account in the assessment.
When calculating a partner's residual income to determine any Dependants Allowance entitlement, we take into account:
- Income Tax
- National Insurance
- mortgage payments or rent payments
- maintenance payments