Chancellor George Osborne announced sweeping increases in personal allowances in his Budget today but taxpayers will have to wait several years to benefit from some of them.
Mr Osborne said that the threshold for higher rate tax would rise from £42,385 to £43,300, above the rate of inflation for the first time in seven years, but that higher rate taxpayers will have to wait until 2017/19 to see the increase.
The personal tax allowance for basic rate taxpayers will rise from £10,000 to £10,600 in April and then to £10,800 next year and £11,000 in 2017/18.

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Mr Osborne said: " When we came to office, the personal tax-free allowance stood at just £6,500. We set ourselves the goal – even in difficult times – of raising that allowance to £10,000 by the end of the parliament. We have more than delivered on that promise. In two weeks' time it will reach £10,600
"That's a huge boost to the incomes of working people and one of the reasons we have a record number of people in work.
"Today I can announce that we go further. The personal tax-free allowance will rise to £10,800 next year – and then to £11,000 the year after.
That's £11,000 you can earn before paying any income tax at all. It means the typical working taxpayer will be over £900 a year better off."
Mr Osborned said the combined changes amounted to a tax cut for 27 million people and mean almost 4 million of the lowest paid have been taken out of income tax altogether.
The Chancellor added that the changes were also a "down-payment on our commitment to raise the personal allowance to £12,500 and raise the Higher Rate threshold to £50,000."
The rate of the new transferable tax allowance for married couples, coming in just two weeks' time, will rise to £1,100 too.
• On IHT, Mr Osborne failed to raise the IHT allowance to £1m or even abolish it, as some pundits had predicted. However he did say that he would investigate abuses of IHT deeds of variation, widely used by some advisers. Some have seen this closing of IHT loopholes as an eventual route to raising the IHT allowance.