Marriage Allowance in 2026/27: transfer £1,260, save up to £252

For the 2026/27 tax year, Marriage Allowance lets a lower-earning spouse or civil partner transfer £1,260 of their Personal Allowance to their partner, cutting that partner's tax bill by up to £252 a year. It is one of the few tax reliefs that requires an active claim rather than happening automatically, and a large number of eligible couples still do not claim it. The rules and the amount are unchanged from 2025/26, because the Personal Allowance itself has not moved.

The 2026/27 figures

Marriage Allowance is fixed at 10% of the standard Personal Allowance, rounded up to the nearest £10. With the Personal Allowance held at £12,570 for 2026/27 — the same figure as 2025/26, 2024/25 and 2023/24, confirmed in HMRC's Income Tax rates and allowances for current and past years — the transferable amount stays at £1,260, and the maximum tax saving stays at £252 (20% of £1,260), exactly as set out on GOV.UK's Marriage Allowance page.

Who actually qualifies

Both partners must be married or in a civil partnership — living together without either does not qualify, however long the relationship. Beyond that, eligibility comes down to each partner's income:

• The person transferring the allowance (the lower earner) must normally have income below the Personal Allowance, so below £12,570 for 2026/27.
• The person receiving it must be a basic-rate taxpayer, meaning income between £12,571 and £50,270 a year — or between £12,571 and £43,662 in Scotland, where the basic-rate band ends sooner.

If the receiving partner is a higher or additional-rate taxpayer, the couple does not qualify at all — the relief is designed specifically for couples where one partner is a non-taxpayer and the other pays the basic rate, not as a general benefit for any married couple.

A worked example

Take a couple where one partner earns £9,500 a year from part-time work and the other earns £30,000 as a full-time employee. The lower earner's income of £9,500 is already below their £12,570 Personal Allowance, so they are not using all of it and pay no Income Tax either way. By transferring £1,260 to their partner:

The lower earner loses nothing, because their income never used the transferred £1,260 of allowance anyway, while the higher earner keeps an extra £1,260 of income tax-free at the 20% basic rate — a straightforward £252 a year for the household with no change in either partner's actual earnings.

How the claim actually works

The lower earner makes the claim, not the person receiving the benefit, through GOV.UK's Marriage Allowance application, and it can be done online in most cases. Once made, the claim renews automatically every tax year until either partner cancels it or a change in circumstances — divorce, a partner's income rising into higher-rate territory, or death — ends eligibility. There is no need to reapply every April so long as nothing has changed.

Backdating a missed claim

Marriage Allowance can be backdated up to four tax years from the date of claiming, provided the couple was eligible throughout. A couple claiming during the 2026/27 tax year could, in principle, backdate as far as 2022/23, recovering the maximum saving for each qualifying year in one lump sum via a change to the receiving partner's tax code or a direct refund, on top of the ongoing saving for the current year.

Why this is not Married Couple's Allowance

The two names are easy to confuse, and they are different reliefs with different rules. Married Couple's Allowance is older and far narrower: it only applies where one partner was born before 6 April 1935, a requirement confirmed on GOV.UK's Married Couple's Allowance page, meaning it now reaches a very small and shrinking number of couples. Rather than transferring a fixed slice of Personal Allowance, it works as a direct percentage reduction of the tax bill — GOV.UK states it "could reduce your tax bill by between £436 and £1,127 a year" — calculated differently depending on whether the marriage or civil partnership began before or after 5 December 2005. Anyone born on or after 6 April 1935, which covers the overwhelming majority of married couples and civil partners today, should be looking at Marriage Allowance rather than Married Couple's Allowance, and the two cannot both be claimed for the same couple in the same year.

What happens if income changes during the year

Eligibility is not locked in permanently once a claim is made. If the lower earner's income rises above the Personal Allowance partway through a tax year, or the higher earner's income grows into higher-rate territory, the couple stops qualifying from that point and should tell HMRC rather than continue claiming. In practice, HMRC reviews Marriage Allowance claims using the income actually reported for the tax year as a whole, so a couple whose circumstances change should not assume the previous year's eligibility automatically carries into the next one without checking both incomes again each year, particularly after a pay rise, a new job, or a partner starting or stopping work.

Where it shows up on a tax bill

For an employee paid through PAYE, Marriage Allowance is usually applied by adjusting the receiving partner's tax code, so the saving arrives gradually through slightly lower tax deducted from each payslip rather than as a single payment. Anyone who wants to see the effect on a full annual tax calculation, including how the transferred allowance interacts with other income, can run the numbers through the income tax calculator, entering the adjusted Personal Allowance figures shown in the worked example above.

Sources

• GOV.UK: Marriage Allowance
• GOV.UK: Marriage Allowance — how it works
• HMRC: Income Tax rates and allowances for current and past years
• GOV.UK: Married Couple's Allowance

This is general information, not tax advice. Individual eligibility depends on both partners' actual income and can change during the year. For a decision about your own household, check your eligibility directly on GOV.UK or speak to a regulated tax adviser.