Reply To: Self Employed Universal Credit customer
It depends what your Scheme says. Ours says to use the DWP’s income figures, so we would use the pay figures from the UC award notice. If £528.48 is the taper deduction figure from the UC notice you need to look at the actual gross & net earnings from the bottom of the notice.
But if you are using Searchlight to deduce the earnings, you need to use £528.48/0.55 etc as you say to work back to the net earnings; £528.48 should be the difference between the maximum UC award and the adjusted award. But you also have to be careful not to deduct any advance repayments etc, as they don’t show as separate amounts on Searchlight; the UC paid figure may be different to the adjusted award because of that.
In other words, if using Searchlight because we don’t have a UC award notice, we would use:
Maximum UC less adjusted UC = taper deduction
Taper deduction / 0.55 plus £344 = net earnings