Newly released figures showed that more people than ever are paying the highest rate of income tax.

Details were published this morning by HMRC, demonstrating that 364,000 people are paying the 45p rate of tax on income over £150,000.
They represent 1.2% of income tax payers in the UK.

This has risen from 330,000 last year and is up from 311,000 in 2013-14.

Some 25.1 million (81.8% of taxpayers) were paying tax at the basic 20% rate, while 4.2 million people (13.7% of taxpayers) pay tax at the higher 40% rate.

More information from the HMRC report

In 2014-15, 26.1 million individuals (84.9%) were non-higher rate taxpayers, 4.3 million individuals (14%) were HR taxpayers and 328,000 (1.1%) were Additional Rate (AR) taxpayers.

In 2017-18, an estimated 25.8 million individuals (85.1%) are non-Higher Rate taxpayers, 4.2 million individuals (13.7%) are HR taxpayers and 364,000 (1.2%) are AR taxpayers.

Among non-Higher Rate taxpayers in 2014-15, there were 285,000 starting rate taxpayers (0.93% of all taxpayers), classified as those with taxable savings only below the £2,880 starting rate limit on which a 10% tax rate applied.

A further 686,000 (2.2%) without taxable earnings but with taxable savings above the starting rate limit and/or taxable dividends were savers rate taxpayers, where rates of 20% and 10% applied to savings and dividends. The remaining 25.1 million (81.8%) of non-Higher Rate taxpayers had taxable earnings and are classified as Basic Rate taxpayers.

The number of Additional Rate taxpayers increased in 2014-15, to a total of 328 thousand from 311 thousand in 2013-14 which is mainly due to the additional rate threshold being fixed at £150,000.

In 1990-91, an estimated 24.4 million individuals, representing the large majority of all income taxpayers (93.5%) were non-higher rate taxpayers. The remaining 1.7 million were higher rate taxpayers.