If you want to pay your tax with your personal credit card, you have just 2 days left to make a payment to HMRC!
From this Saturday, 13th January, HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) is to stop accepting payments by credit card – less than three weeks before the deadline for self assessment tax returns.
This means that anyone planning on paying their tax bill this way now has just 2 days to file their return.
More than 800,000 tax payments were made by credit card in 2015-16.
While personal credit cards will no longer be accepted, corporate and business cards won’t be affected. The change is the a result of a new directive that will ban companies from charging a fee when customers use Mastercard and Visa credit cards. As it stands, many companies demand a surcharge for credit card payments to cover their processing fees – and HMRC received a total of £13.2m in credit card surcharges in 2015-16. From 13 January, however, companies will either have to foot the processing bill themselves or stop accepting credit card payments.
An HMRC spokesman said:
“We will no longer be accepting personal credit card payments from the 13 January as new rules mean that we can no longer pass on what our bank charge for processing a credit card payment. It would be unfair to expect other taxpayers to pick up this cost. There are a range of ways for people to pay us depending on the type of tax being paid, including debit cards, Direct Debit, Faster Payment and BACS.”
