{"id":300928,"date":"2026-02-20T11:26:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-20T11:26:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/300928\/"},"modified":"2026-02-20T11:26:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-20T11:26:07","slug":"higher-tax-helped-government-finance-reach-record-january-surplus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/300928\/","title":{"rendered":"Higher tax helped government finance reach record January surplus"},"content":{"rendered":"

The ONS said National Insurance contributions increased by \u00a32.9bn in January, which also helping bump government income.<\/p>\n

It added that another factor for the January uptick was more money made from income tax, which came in at \u00a33.6bn more than last January.<\/p>\n

The Treasury’s freeze on income tax thresholds<\/a> is dragging people in to paying higher tax rates as their incomes rise which aided the increase in income tax receipts, according to Paul Dales, chief economist at Capital Economics.<\/p>\n

Borrowing in the 10 months to January was \u00a3112.1bn – 11.5% lower than the same 10 month period a year ago – although the ONS noted that it was the fifth-highest borrowing for the period on record.<\/p>\n

HM Treasury said borrowing for 2026 is forecast to be “the lowest since before the pandemic.”<\/p>\n

Chief Secretary to the Treasury, James Murray said: “We know there is more to do to stop one in every \u00a310 the government spends going on debt interest, and we will more than halve borrowing by 2030-31 so that money can be spent on policing, schools and the NHS.”<\/p>\n

Separately, retail sales grew more than expected in January, according to official data.<\/p>\n

The amount of goods bought rose by 1.8% in January, up from 0.4% in December, the ONS reported.<\/p>\n

City economists had expected a rise of 0.2%. <\/p>\n

The performance was boosted by strong demand for sports supplements and jewellery. Sales of artwork and antiques also did well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The ONS said National Insurance contributions increased by \u00a32.9bn in January, which also helping bump government income. It…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":300929,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[114,184,85,46],"class_list":["post-300928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=300928"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300928\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/300929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}