Permitted work on ESA - confused over earnings vs withdrawal

Gundam_Fan

Hi all,

I'm wanting to explore permitted work

Now I understand the rules are as follows

• work for less than 16 hours each week
• earn no more than £183.50 each week, after tax and National Insurance has been taken off

I want to be sure I'm doing things correctly so I have a query

I'm thinking of streaming some of my hobbies so lets say I earnt £200 in a week (I'm not expecting to actually make this amount) but I withdrew the £183.50 from it and kept the rest in the streaming platforms account and carried this over to the week after would this be within the rules?

I'm just concerned that whilst I could only do those hours if I was to randomly get some donations or something, I could easily be pushed outside of my earning range and wouldn't have control over it which would make this an unattainable option

I wanted to try ask here before maybe going to ask in the jobcenter

Thank-you

poppy123456

As you won't be working for an employer you'll very likely be treated as self employed, which you must report if you start working.

There will be allowable expenses with this but I don't know exactly what they are. Self employed and permitted work is not straight forward and there's very little information out there about this.

All I can advise is that you can't just keep your earnings in a different account and not include them. Your earnings would be the difference between the money that you earned and the expenses you had (if any) so say for example you earned £200 and you had expenses of £50 then your total earnings would be £150.

ESA would also ask to say any paper work that you have such as receipts etc. You would also need to report being self employed to HMRC if your earnings are more than £1,000.

Please also be aware that if any of your ESA is contributions based (or New style) then both of those are taxable income.

There's some information here about registering as self employed.

https://www.moneyhelper.org.uk/en/work/self-employment/tax-and-national-insurance-when-youre-self-employed