Savers can now squirrel a further £10,000 from the tax man, as National Savings & Investments ups the lifetime limit on Premium Bonds.
As of today, you can own £40,000 of the tax-efficient savings products, up from £30,000. The increase is just one of the many “support for savers” measures announced in this year’s Budget by Chancellor George Osborne.
More than 20 million people are reported to own Premium Bonds, and every bond has a 24,000-to-one chance of winning a prize. NS&I hold a prize draw monthly, with at least one £1 million pay-out, around three pay-outs of £100,000 and up to two million £25 prizes. Nationwide, there are currently nearly 900,000 unclaimed Premium Bond prizes worth more than £40 million. There is no time limit for claiming prizes.
NS&I set the size of easy month’s total prize money by calculating one month’s interest rate of 1.3% on the total value of all eligible bonds, which works out at odds of 26,000 to 1. No income tax is payable on prizes. This compares to tax-efficient savings rates on variable ISAs of up to 2.5%, offered by Nationwide.
The Government uses National Savings & Investment to raise money domestically, as an alternative to gilts. Just as deposits in banks and building societies are backed by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, NS&I is backed by the Treasury.
Unlike banks and building societies who chose their own deposit limit, NS&I is set an annual "net financing target" by the Treasury which governs how much money it raises each year from savers. This impacts whether it issues its extremely popular inflation-linked savings certificates.
In 2012, NS&I said that the Government’s financing target was too low to offer the product. This target is based on a balance of the interests of savers, the wider financial services industry and taxpayers.