Scots on lower incomes will save at most £40 a year as a result of SNP changes to income tax thresholds announced this week.
Scots “couldn’t buy a Mars Bar” as a result of the “tiny” tax changes made at the SNP Budget, Labour has said.
Lower earners will save “about 70 pence a week” thanks to the threshold reforms revealed yesterday.
Shona Robison, the Finance Secretary, announced changes to thresholds for the basic and intermediate rates of income tax – which will allow SNP politicians to continue to claim that most taxpayers pay less in Scotland than they would if they lived in the rest of the UK.
It means from April the lowest earners in Scotland will save at most £40 per year as a result of the differing income tax regime north of the Border. But Scots on a salary of £50,000 will pay almost £1,500 more than if they lived in England, rising to £2,300 for someone on £80,000.
Michael Marra, Scottish Labour finance spokesman, said for most people the tax changes would save them “potentially about 70 pence a week”. He added: ‘You couldn’t buy a Mars bar for that”.
The MSP said: “It really is tiny, marginal changes and this is what the Finance Secretary was trumpeting. What she didn’t talk about was the large number of people who are being dragged into the higher tax bands over the period of the next three years, which is the single biggest tax change in the Budget.
“There was no mention of that in the statement, but that is really where the bulk of the money is going to come from.”
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Marra said this change – which the Scottish Fiscal Commission has said will help increase tax revenues by £72 million in 2027-28 and approximately £200 million a year from 2028-29 onwards – was needed because “the drop in tax receipts in the last few months has put more pressure on the management of a Budget which was already in chaos from the SNP”.
He claimed the SNP had “managed to turn £10.3 billion of additional funding from the UK Government into a massive problem through their own mistakes”.
Scottish Conservative finance spokesperson Craig Hoy branded the Budget an “insult to hardworking Scottish workers”, claiming the changes to tax bands for lower earners would only leave them about £40 a year better off.
Mr Hoy told BBC Radio Scotland: “Ultimately what we also know is by the end of this decade the majority of hardworking Scots will be paying the upper rate of tax in Scotland.
“That is a tax that was designed for high earners which will be paid by average earners.”
Hoy said: “If you are earning £43,000 a year and you get a £2,000 pay increase next year, the Scottish Government will take £1,000 of that.
“That’s not fair, it’s not equitable, and that is why the Scottish Government is not growing the Scottish economy.”
Robison claimed today it would have been “extraordinarily expensive” for the Scottish Government to have increased tax thresholds for higher earners.
The SNP Government opted to raise the thresholds for the basic and intermediate levels of income tax, she kept thresholds for other bands paid by higher earners frozen.
As a result, more than 100,000 Scots are now expected to have to pay income tax at higher rates.
While in 2025-26 there were 728,000 taxpayers in the higher, advanced and top bands, the Scottish Government now expects that to increase to 834,000 in 2026-27.
Robison said it would have cost £125 million alone to increase the threshold for the 42p higher rate of income tax from its current level of £43,663 to £44,000.
