Additional contributions to Sipp: non-earner

[JOHNRE]

Hello, looking for some views.
For pension purposes I have no "relevant earnings" (my sole income is from an occupational pension). I appreciate that I can only put £2880 into my Sipp each year if I want to attract tax relief. However, would it be possible to put a larger amount in if I asked the Sipp provider (Hargreaves Lansdown) NOT to apply for the tax relief on this additional contribution? Has anyone else gone down this route before?

[someone]

Firstly, I'm not sure why you would want to - why not put it into an isa instead?

You're (probably) going to pay tax (again) when you withdraw it and you're restricting what you can do with the money in the future (up to and including the possibility that the government will increase the minimum pension age to 250 in order to completely eliminate the pensions deficit!)

There are rules relating to overpayments into pensions - basically your annual income is increased by the amount of payment over the annual allowance. But I'm not sure what happens if your income doesn't get you into the basic rate tax band. It would seem to be a loophole that someone could pay 11000 into their pension, have their zero income increased to 11000 and then pay no tax as it's below the annual allowance and have their pension reclaim 2.5K tax relief

Why not call HL and ask them? I suspect that they will not be able to avoid reclaiming the tax but you might be able to pay that tax back to the tax man. e.g. If you want to pay in an extra 10000 then you send 8000 to HL, HL claims 2000 (getting you to the 10K you wanted) and then you put a 10K overpayment onto your tax return that, assuming you're a BR tax payer will then result in you paying an extra 2K in tax. HL are more likely to give you accurate and honest advice than anyone on the web (including me )