Income Tax - Better off Married or Not

Hi All

Myself & my partner are getting married in the Summer.
We are both working and are presently obviously taxed individually.
I earn 30K gross with company vehicle/ expenses covered and my fiancee works in the public sector, presently grossing approx 26,500 pa.

Tax is not my thing, but just checking if someone could please work out whether we would be better off being joint assessed or not after we marry? Please feel free to provide calculation. I may learn something...

Cheers in advance.

I have to laugh, I thought you were asking should you get married or not !!!

I don't know the calculations but based on your income details, we were the same when we got married.

Kept being separately assessed and this didn't change our income. We did however have an tax issue for my husband a few years ago. He failed to cancel a tax credit for pension contributions, owned up & has had a tax underpayment for the last 3 years reducing his income. This didn't affect mine and also I was able to claim for medical expenses which I received rather than offsetting against his underpayment.

As I said I don't know any calculations so the above may be useless !!

My own situation is that we are both assessed separately - we have similar take home pay, tax credits etc, so at the time (close to 10 years ago) it wasn't of benefit for us to be jointly assessed...
You should change the title of your thread also - might get more hits / responses...

My spreadsheet might help with this- download it at:

Irish PAYE tax calculator

It's in Excel 2007 format so won't work in anything below that (e.g. it won't work in Excel 2003, is fine in Excel 2007 or 2010). It also requires that you allow macro code to run- leave a message here if you need any clarifications.

If you are both in PAYE employment and both earning under the standard rate cut off point of €32,800, there won't be much (if any) benefit to being jointly assessed.

There will be no benefit to you at the moment in being jointly assessed. However if one of you takes a drop in salary in the future e.g during maternity leave or sickness there might be a benefit. I'm not too sure about this though, it is difficult to get information on this