Transfer employer’s National Insurance to employees
How to transfer employer’s National Insurance liability to employees, for employment income from certain shares and share options.
Overview
As an employer, you can legally agree with your employees to transfer some National Insurance contributions liability to them. This will often be because they’ve gotten employment income from certain shares and share options.
This is known as a joint National Insurance contributions election. Making this transfer can help you avoid unexpected National Insurance payments.
To make an election to transfer, you need to either:
- complete a HMRC pre-approved legal document
- draft your own legal document
Complete HMRC pre-approved legal documents
From 1 May 2025, if you use a pre-approved legal document to make an election, you will not need to send the document to HMRC for approval.
When using a HMRC pre-approved legal document, you’ll need to:
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Complete the document.
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Sign and date the document.
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Get the employee or employees to sign and date the document.
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Keep a copy of the completed and signed document. You should be able to show this to us if we request it later.
The joint election will only become effective once it has been signed and dated by both the employee and the employer (the secondary contributor).
These are the HMRC pre-approved legal documents. You can use:
- a single joint election to transfer contributions for a single employee
- a 2-part joint election to transfer contributions for more than one employee
Draft your own legal document
You can draft your own legal document. You’ll need to send this to HMRC for approval. This can take up to 30 days.
You can use the HMRC pre-approved legal document to help you draft your own legal document. It contains the minimum legal requirements to make your election. You can also find these requirements in HMRC internal manual ERSM 170760.
Your draft document must meet these minimum legal requirements. It must not contain your employee’s name or National Insurance number. Do not sign the document before sending it to us.
Submit your own legal document
Once you’ve completed your document, you need to send it for approval, along with:
- a copy of the scheme rules
- any other document that impacts how the joint National Insurance contributions election works
Post
Send your document by post, to:
Charities, Savings and International 1
HMRC
BX9 1AU
Read guidance about corresponding with HMRC by email. This will explain:
- how to confirm you want to correspond with us by email
- the risks of using email, and how we can reduce them
- how to opt out of using email to correspond with us
Once you’ve confirmed that you want to use email, you can send your own legal documents to: shareschemes@hmrc.gov.uk.
You must include ‘NIC Election Approval Required’ in the subject line of the email.
Updates to this page
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From 1 May 2025, you can use HMRC pre-approved legal documents to make an election to transfer employer’s National Insurance to employees.
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First published.