Give as you Earn

It’s easy to Give As You Earn

It’s good to give a little back – according to last year’s World Giving Index, 76% of people in the UK give money to charity in a typical month. The University’s Give As You Earn (GAYE) scheme makes it easy and tax-effective to support your favourite charities by making tax-free donations directly from your salary.

The scheme is run through the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF), a registered charity to help people and businesses support the causes they care about. The CAF database contains over 160,000 charities, covering almost every registered charity in the UK, as well as organisations that have a recognised charitable purpose such as community groups.

Giving directly through payroll has tax benefits as your donation is taken from your pay before income tax is calculated and deducted. So if you’re on the 20% tax rate, a £20 donation will cost you just £16, while the £4 that would have been paid in tax goes direct to the charity (less a small administration fee deducted by CAF). On the 40% tax rate, the tax reduction is £8 on a £20 donation, and on 45% it is £9.

Once you have decided how much you would like to give each month, you have three options:

• You can nominate a charity or group of charities to benefit from your monthly donation. The contribution is deducted from your salary and CAF forwards the donations to the charity(ies) concerned.
• If you give more than £10 a month, you can create a ‘Personal Charity Account’, allowing you to donate to any charity at any time using a charity chequebook (for example, supporting an emergency appeal or a friend doing a charity fun run).
• You can club together with colleagues and pool your donations to form a ‘staff charity fund’, which has a chequebook facility.

To find out more, visit the GAYE page on the University website at www.admin.ox.ac.uk/finance/processes/payroll/gaye.