In his Spring Budget 2017 the chancellor Philip Hammond announced his intention to increase the main rate of class 4 NIC from 9% to 11% by 6 April 2019. Had this proposal gone through it would have resulted in the near full alignment of the self-employed NIC charge with employee’s class 1 NIC. But in the end the proposal was dropped amid questions of whether it breached the Conservative Party’s 2015 election manifesto.
However politics aside from a policy perspective many would argue that the proposal had a lot to commend it.
Historically self-employed NIC has been set at a lower rate than employee’s NIC as the following example illustrates:
.jpg?sfvrsn=335a554c_0 "300 x 250 (MPU)")
