Reform UK has pledged to raise the income-tax personal allowance from £12,570 to £15,000 within the first 100 days of a future Reform government.
Robert Jenrick, the party’s economic spokesman, used its conference in Birmingham to promise that the increase would be delivered in Reform’s first Budget if the party won power. He also said he would resign as Chancellor if the commitment were not implemented within the stated timetable.
Jenrick said: “In the first 100 days of a Reform government… we will raise the tax-free personal allowance… to £15,000.”
Reform says the increase would benefit around 40 million people, save a typical basic-rate taxpayer roughly £500 a year, and remove about 2.9 million people from income tax altogether. The party has put the initial fiscal cost at close to £18bn, rising towards £21bn over time.
Jenrick also retained Reform’s longer-term ambition to raise the allowance to £20,000, but said further increases would take place only when they could be fully funded. The immediate £15,000 proposal is therefore being presented separately as a first-Budget commitment.
The policy would reverse part of the fiscal drag created by successive freezes in income-tax thresholds. The personal allowance has remained at £12,570 since 2021 and, under current Government policy, is due to stay at that level until April 2031.
As wages and prices rise while thresholds remain fixed, more income becomes taxable and more people are drawn into the tax system. That increases revenue without requiring a change in headline tax rates.
Institute for Fiscal Studies analysis has estimated that the allowance would stand considerably higher today had it continued to rise with inflation since 2021. The freeze has also brought millions more people into income tax than would otherwise have paid it.
Raising the allowance differs from cutting the basic rate because it reduces the amount of income subject to tax before the rate is applied. Lower earners can leave the income-tax system entirely, while taxpayers higher up the income distribution also receive a reduction until other allowance rules begin to apply.
The interaction becomes more complicated for people receiving means-tested benefits and for higher earners whose personal allowance is withdrawn above £100,000. The overall distributional effect therefore depends on household circumstances as well as the headline threshold.
For employers, the direct consequence would be principally administrative rather than a reduction in employer taxation. PAYE systems and tax codes would need to reflect revised thresholds, but the proposal does not in itself cut employer National Insurance contributions or other employment costs.
The central issue is funding. A tax reduction on this scale has to be matched by lower spending, higher revenue elsewhere, additional borrowing, or a combination of those measures. Reform has linked its broader fiscal programme to reductions in welfare spending, overseas aid, public administration, and net-zero-related expenditure.
Those savings would need to be delivered on a timetable consistent with the tax commitment if the measure were to avoid increasing borrowing. The fiscal arithmetic would also be assessed against gilt-market conditions because additional borrowing expectations can feed directly into government debt-servicing costs.
The size of the proposal is material. Even relatively small changes to the personal allowance carry substantial Exchequer costs because the threshold affects tens of millions of taxpayers. Raising it by £2,430 therefore represents a much larger fiscal intervention than simply ending the current freeze for one year.
Detailed design would also determine how the policy interacts with the higher-rate threshold and National Insurance. Governments can legislate to change those thresholds independently, so the final cost and distributional effect cannot be inferred from the £15,000 allowance alone.
The pledge remains an opposition policy proposal rather than a change to current tax law. The statutory personal allowance remains £12,570, and existing policy maintains that figure through the current threshold-freeze period.
Reform’s commitment nevertheless adds a significant tax proposal to the developing economic-policy debate. Its credibility will ultimately depend on whether the party can identify savings sufficient to finance the allowance increase while maintaining its other spending, tax, and borrowing commitments.
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