Rishi Sunak has just released his tax returns. In the 21/22 tax year Rishi earned £1,970,992, on which he paid £446,430, an effective tax rate of 22.7%. This was largely due to c. £1.6m of capital gains being taxed at 20%.

If you were on PAYE and you earned £80,000 you would have paid tax of £19,432 for that tax year (not including the £5,749 of employees NIC also due). This gives an effective tax rate of 24.3%, which is higher than Rishi’s, despite earning just 4% of what Rishi earned in that year.

It now seems more understandable why Rishi didn’t raise CGT rates in his budgets, as we expected in the tax profession!