What does the tax code
1248L mean?
1248L means £90 off your allowance. Small perks from an employer are only tax free inside the trivial benefits exemption, and the conditions are stricter than most people assume.
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Get the detailed breakdown + free reclaim guideEmployers give people small things all the time: a hamper at Christmas, flowers for a bereavement, a voucher for a birthday. Most of these are genuinely tax free, and the reason is a specific exemption with specific conditions.
Where a perk falls outside those conditions, it becomes an ordinary taxable benefit, and a small deduction appears in a tax code for something the recipient thought of as a gesture. 1248L, at £12,480 of tax-free pay and a cost of about £18 a year, is the kind of code that results.
- 1248L Tax Code
- An ordinary L-suffix code giving £12,480 of tax-free pay for 2026/27, £90 below the standard allowance. The L means normal allowance rules apply. Deductions of this size can represent a small taxable perk from an employer, an estimate of untaxed income, or the net of several smaller items.
The trivial benefits exemption
HMRC exempts small benefits from tax where all of the following are true. The word "all" is doing the work: failing any one condition makes the whole thing taxable.
It cost £50 or less to provide. Not £50 on average, and not £50 after some allocation. The cost of the individual benefit.
It is not cash or a cash voucher. A voucher exchangeable only for goods can qualify. Anything convertible into cash cannot.
It is not a reward for work or performance. This is the condition people trip over. A gift given because someone hit a target, closed a deal, or worked a difficult shift is a reward, and rewards are pay by another name. A gift given for a birthday, a wedding or Christmas is not.
It is not something in your contract or a term of employment. If you are entitled to it, it is not a gesture.
Meet all four and there is nothing to tax and nothing to report. Fail one and the entire value is taxable, not just any excess above £50.
The cliff edge is the point
That last sentence is where the money is. This is an exemption, not an allowance.
A £45 gift that qualifies is entirely tax free. A £55 gift is entirely taxable, all £55 of it, not the £5 over the line. There is no tapering and no partial relief.
The practical consequence is that a handful of small perks that individually feel trivial can produce a deduction that looks arbitrary. Two £45 vouchers that both qualify contribute nothing. One £55 voucher contributes £55. The code shows only the total, and the total does not obviously relate to anything the recipient can remember receiving.
Worked example: 1248L on a £30,000 salary
- Gross salary: £30,000
- Subtract the 1248L allowance: £30,000 minus £12,480 = £17,520 of taxable income
- All within the basic rate band, taxed at 20%
- Income tax for the year: £3,504
- Monthly tax-free pay: £12,480 divided by 12 = £1,040
On the standard 1257L code the same salary produces £17,430 taxable and £3,486 of tax. The deduction costs £18 across the year, or £1.50 a month. Income tax only, National Insurance excluded, and an estimate to confirm with HMRC.
The other small exemptions worth knowing
Trivial benefits are the best known of the small exemptions, but they are not the only ones, and several cover things people assume must be taxable.
Long service awards. A non-cash award for a long period of continuous service can be exempt, subject to conditions on the length of service and the value in relation to each year served. Cash never qualifies.
Annual staff functions. Employers can spend up to a set amount per head each year on annual events such as a Christmas party without a benefit arising, provided the event is open to staff generally. Like trivial benefits, it is an exemption rather than an allowance: exceed the limit and the whole cost per head becomes taxable, not just the excess.
Workplace parking. Parking at or near your place of work is exempt.
Health screening and eye tests. A single health screening or medical check-up a year can be exempt, as can eye tests and corrective glasses where these are required for display screen work.
Mobile phones. One mobile phone provided to an employee is exempt, including private use, provided the contract is between the employer and the provider.
Workplace nurseries and cycle to work. Both have their own exemptions with their own conditions.
What these have in common is that each is a specific carve-out with specific conditions, rather than a general principle that small things are not taxed. The default is that anything of value from your employer is taxable, and the exemptions are the exceptions.
So a deduction you cannot explain is worth asking about, and equally a perk you assumed must be taxable may well not be.
What the £90 might not be
Small deductions have many possible causes, and a perk is only one. Before concluding anything, consider:
- An estimate of untaxed income, such as savings interest, covered on our 1255L page
- Recovery of a very small underpayment, where £90 collects about £18 of debt, explained on our 1160L page
- A part-year benefit valued proportionately, which will grow next year
- A net figure, where a larger addition and a larger deduction happen to land £90 apart
The description on the coding notice is the only thing that distinguishes them, which is a theme across every page in this family for a reason.
A note for people who are also directors
The trivial benefits rules have an extra layer for directors of close companies: an annual cap applies to the total value of trivial benefits provided to a director and their family in a tax year, on top of the £50 per benefit limit.
If you are an employee rather than a director, no annual cap applies to you. Each benefit is judged on its own against the four conditions.
One last framing that helps. The exemptions exist because taxing a birthday card would be absurd, not because small amounts are outside the tax system in principle. Every one of them is a deliberate carve-out with its own conditions, drafted to stop reasonable gestures being treated as pay while preventing the same route being used to deliver actual remuneration untaxed. Read that way, the strictness of the conditions makes sense: the line has to be somewhere, and it has to be somewhere a payroll department can apply without judgement.
What to do about it
Honestly, at £18 a year, usually nothing. If your coding notice explains the £90 and it matches something you recognise, the amount does not justify a phone call.
It is worth looking properly if you cannot account for it at all, if it has been growing year on year, if it relates to a job you have left, or if you have two employments both showing a full allowance, which is an error worth roughly £2,514 a year and dwarfs everything on this page.
To look: sign in to your Personal Tax Account at gov.uk/personal-tax-account and open "Check your Income Tax". The breakdown gives each item in pounds with a description. If it relates to a benefit, compare it against your P11D, which is your employer's statement of what it reported.
The Income Tax helpline is 0300 200 3300. Our guide to checking your tax code covers where each figure appears, and our 1240L page covers the risk of a benefit being taxed through both your code and your payroll at once.
Our free tax code checker will estimate what your code should be for your circumstances. It gives an estimate rather than advice.
People also ask
- 1248L gives £12,480 of tax-free pay, £90 below the standard allowance, costing about £18 a year
- Small employer perks are tax free only where all four trivial benefits conditions are met
- The benefit must cost £50 or less, not be cash, not reward performance, and not be contractual
- It is an exemption, not an allowance: exceed £50 and the entire value is taxable, not just the excess
- A gift tied to hitting a target is a reward and is taxable however small
- Directors of close companies have an additional annual cap that ordinary employees do not
- A £90 deduction has many possible causes, and only the coding notice distinguishes them
Related tax codes: 1249L tax code | 1246L tax code | 1240L tax code | 1152L tax code | 1257L tax code
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