Income Tax (Earnings and Pensions) Act 2003 section 344

Deduction for annual subscriptions

Section 344 allows employees to deduct annual subscriptions paid to HMRC-approved professional bodies from their taxable earnings, provided those bodies carry out activities that are of direct benefit to the employee's profession.

• Employees may deduct from their taxable earnings the cost of annual subscriptions paid to professional bodies that have been approved by HMRC, provided the body's activities are of direct benefit to, or concern the profession practised in, the employee's role.
• To qualify for approval, a professional body must operate on a not-for-profit basis, must not be mainly local in character, and must have activities wholly or mainly directed towards advancing knowledge, maintaining professional standards, or providing indemnity protection to members against professional liability claims.
• Where a body's activities are to a significant extent directed towards purposes outside the qualifying objectives, HMRC may restrict the deduction to a proportionate part of the subscription, determined by reference to the body's expenditure on qualifying versus non-qualifying activities and all other relevant circumstances.
• Subscriptions paid before the body's application for approval but in the same tax year, or paid after the application but before approval is granted, are treated as having been paid to an approved body, so the deduction is not lost simply because of timing.