Former contractor (company dissolved years ago). I'm not liking the fact that googling my uncommon name gives my full address and part of my birth date in the Companies House site as the first result. I'd like to remove it completely.
Has anyone done this before and did it end up costing a lot of money?
I’ve just landed a new assignment and will be moving from my first interim role at £480/day PAYE, which I started six months ago, to a new role at £650/day through an umbrella company. I’m really pleased with the opportunity but I’m starting to wonder whether the pay rise is quite as good as I initially thought.
For context, my current client rate is actually £600/day, but after the agency takes its cut, I’m paid £480/day. I also accrue two days of annual leave per month, with additional leave accruing if I work more days.
The new role is £650/day, all-inclusive through an umbrella company. Both roles are remote-first, with very little office attendance, so the working arrangements are pretty much the same.
I’m an accountant so I understand the general tax side of things, but I’ve never worked through an umbrella before and am finding it difficult to work out what I should actually expect to take home. I’ve done a fair bit of reading, but there are a quite few things I’m still unclear on.
Holiday pay: My understanding is that I’m entitled to statutory holiday pay, but is this taken out of the £650 assignment rate or paid on top? Is it held back and paid when I take leave, or can it be included in my regular pay? I’m trying to understand whether I’ll be worse off when I take time off compared with my current arrangement.
Take home pay: I currently take home around £1,600 a week (Exc any student finance deductions) and the estimates I’m getting for the new role range from roughly £1,400 to £1,850, depending on the calculator and assumptions. I was hoping to get closer to £2k net a week, so perhaps I was being a bit optimistic! For those on similar rates, what are you actually taking home? I appreciate it depends on individual circumstances.
Umbrella companies: I’ve been advised to look at Giant or PayStream. Are these good options, or are there better companies worth considering? I’d rather keep fees down, but I also want a reputable, compliant provider with transparent deductions and decent customer service. Is there much difference between providers in practice, or are they broadly similar?
One of my main concerns is getting paid and reported correctly. With my current agency, I’ve had issues with my £5k student loan deductions to date not being credited to my Student Finance account and my salary apparently not being reported correctly by £4k between tax years to HMRC. It’s been a significant headache trying to get it resolved, so I’m keen to avoid going through the same thing again.
Is there anything specific I should look for when choosing an umbrella company to make sure PAYE, National Insurance and student loan deductions are processed and reported correctly?
If you’ve made a similar move from agency PAYE to an umbrella, I’d be really interested to hear how you found it, which providers you’d recommend and whether there’s anything you wish you’d known beforehand.
Thanks very much!
in the UK, working as a web developer for a company in the US, they have no overseas entity.
I work through a UK based umbrella company, which me plus the US firm agreed on when we started, they are open to changing this if I need to.
I'm separately self employed/sole trader and do self assessment - not a limited company.
At the start I just wanted to get set up and the umbrella seemed the easiest as it took away the concerns of whether I was in/out of IR35.
I'm now 18+ months in and lose so much every month due to paying the umbrella service charge, bank fees, and employers national insurance.
As I'm self employed as a sole trader, and the contract allows me to work for others, non exclusive contract (which I do, but doesn't bring in anywhere as much), remote, no set working hours, etc, it seems like I would be better billing direct and filling out the W8 form tax treaty form for them? Saving me thousands alone in the employers national insurance which I have to pay for using the umbrella.
Worth noting: I have a limited company in voluntary liquidation, the company I'm now contracted to bought the assets from that company, I shut it down, and started working for them via the umbrella.
I assume the answer is it's safer to stay in the umbrella, but I just want to check if I'm being too cautious using the umbrella company, and effectively doing myself outta money when I shouldn't be.
Sharing this as I tend to read a lot of bad news on contracts/offshoring so wanted to share my story.
I was a contractor for over a decade working mainly between Finance and Government. My rates varied from £600 outside to £800 pd outside with an additional £300 pd coming from introductions (I knew people with niche skills who worked through my company). So I was making £1100 per day outside. Which I know is a dream rate for a lot of people.
I was bored as hell though. In government nothing was moving. I had lots of authority but the orgs were just grinding. Most of my time was spent in meetings presenting the same deck over and over and I got somewhat resentful of the income and contract. Everything was WFH which meant I spent a lot of time effectively doing nothing.
I bid on other government contracts but it was really stuff I didn't want to do i.e. "migrate legacy Oracle database for DWP", "call centre tech transformation for DVLA". Things which could be profitable but I was not really going to win these without some kind of help and even if I did win them, I knew it was more slide deck jockeying.
Some people I know that left contracting became CTOs in big orgs. Some went to Apple, Meta. Others went into trading companies where they did very well. I felt like I missed the boat by playing very safe.
A good friend of mine took a start up CTO role (after contracting) for a company that raised about £10 million and then went bust. He did some other tech leadership roles but had a 6 month unemployed phase. He was then picked up as an enterprise CTO for a pretty big and successful org. He was my inspiration.
So I pulled the pin. After 12 years of contracting, I joined a start-up as CTO. I really worked hard, for the first time in many years. I was putting in long hours, pushing extreme amounts of code. I had a savings safety blanket which was painful to see dwindle. What was really motivating me was just doing stuff again, a mission! Sleeves rolled up, smashing through, picking up the frontier model coding tools, agentic workflows, all the cool stuff.
It didn't work out with the CEO. He starting becoming very passive when the VCs passed on the first round and checked out while I was moving mountains. So, parted company after about 8/9 months. It's still going and has a runway (for now at least).
So I was back in the market during the summer. Complete tumbleweeds. Started seeing roles for Architects going for £600 inside IR35, 1 day per week in the office. Heart breaking! Then some more start up CEOs reached out. Then some orgs looking for senior AI leaders. Slow though, like 1/2 calls per week max. Some rejections, one or two interviews with the weird and wild variety of tech interviews people use these days.
Then a small niche finance player, super tech heavy reached out last week. Very high paying (much more than the contract rate). Latest tech, AI tooling, agents, LLMs, the lot. In some ways, a dream role just basically turned up for me. It also is a path into other parts of that industry.
It took a lot of faith but I know I personally couldn't just spin the contractor wheel. I did actually apply for some of those £600 inside IR35 roles but was not considered. Maybe I was confusing to the CV filters at this point.
Sometimes you have to ask the universe, and it responds.
I’ve been offered a contract that’s outside IR35 but the day rate is quite a bit lower than some of the inside IR35 roles I’ve been seeing.
The difference is big enough that on paper the inside role actually comes out fairly similar, once I account for the different tax treatment.
I’ve always preferred outside because I like having the Ltd company, being able to retain some profit, pension contributions etc but I’m starting to wonder whether I’m putting too much value on the “outside” label and the contract itself looks decent and the working arrangements seem genuinely independent, so it’s not really an IR35-risk question. It’s more whether the extra admin and uncertainty are worth it for a lower rate.
For those who have done both recently, how much of a rate difference would make you choose inside over outside? like I’m curious what other contractors are actually doing rather than what the theoretical calculation says.
Seeing a few posts about this happening more often. What’s the benefit to them as it’s nowhere near as good as a plain old ex-client or agency reference as that gives you the job title as well.
As an aside, I’d be pretty uncomfortable giving a recruitment consultant (or anyone) access to my tax records without knowing precisely who they were and what their process was.
Hi all,
I have completed my first official outside contract recently and on the look out for my next one.
I wonder if people have found it difficult to get mortgage with your own Ltd. company?
I will probably still rent for another year (at a redicuous £975 a month rent) and build up some savings then would like to consider buying a place.
How did everyone else find it? Was it difficult? Just because it's not 'permanent'.
One is offering 575 inside and another is 400 outside, outside is a 12 months contract and inside is a 9 month. Both are the same roles!
Which one would you go for?
My manager has hinted a few times about wanting to make me perm, and of course been up front that this would mean the salary is not comparable as a headline figure, but he will give me full details of the package.
A little bit, I'd like to have my cake and eat it, so I'd like to push through a 6-month extension, rebuild my finances a bit and then go perm after that.
He kind of sprung it on me in our last meeting, so I sort of indicated I'd be interested in staying long-term. But having rationally thought about it a bit more, I'm wondering how to delay the perm side of things.
Is it reasonable to come back and say "in the short term, due to my remortgage and things, a contract extension would be my better option, and we can look at going perm at the end of this extension, understanding the possibility that the roles may no longer be available come march/april"?
How would you phrase it?
NGL things are looking horrible right now. Have been out since February. Admittedly started looking in April and have had two offers which both fell through, unbelievable luck.
Anyone else feeling this? Im going to start looking for FTC next week for 6-12 months as I don’t want to be a full year out of work as Xmas downtime is approaching.
Thoughts?
I’ve somehow ended up with two offers. Both are Inside. One is better as it’s a bigger company (company B), so the chance of having it on my CV even as a contract will be worth taking the role.
first offer (company A) was very slow to contact me, they contacted me 5 months ago, got in touch only just last week and arranged a call, made an offer that same day. Start date is this Monday. I sent them details to send contract, it arrived only yesterday. Not yet signed, it would have 1 week notice.
In the meantime, I had already been in contact with a few other potential clients, and had an interview last week with a much larger company (company B), they made an offer this Monday. they gave a start date for the coming Thursday. I’ve not yet received the contract. But have been through all their compliance checks, etc. I have asked the recruiter when contract may come, they said today or tomorrow hopefully.
So I am stuck in limbo. Worried the big company could pull the offer, so don’t want to yet say anything to the first company. But currently I have a start date Monday with company A, I’d probably need to tell them by tomorrow. No contract yet from company B, but a start date on Thursday.
any advice from seasoned contractors? they are both full time, in-house, inside. So I can’t do both, and the notice period of company A would be longer than company B’s start date.
Current employer reference.
Need some adivice here as I am extremely confused. Got made redundant in sep 2025. After a year of job searching I have secured a contract role of 6 months. Umbrella company > Agency > client 1 > end client 2. I have now also secured a permanent job with company B which is a less than what i used to be earning a year back but have no choice. This conpany B while doing background verification asked my employment history through HMRC. Now since my contractual current employment is not appearing in HMRC as I have only joined recently ( payslips have not generated yet) they would like to reach out to them (gave them HR contact of the Agency) for reference check. I have not resigned yet as I am awaiting background verification to complete.
What do I do?
Also when the time comes who should I submit my resignation to? Client 1 or Umbrella company?