Selling your business
If you are wondering whether, or when, you should dispose of your business, a sensible first step is to form an outline plan.
The sale of a successful trading company will generate a capital gain. This would normally be taxed at 20% after deduction of your annual exemption (£12,300 for 2020/21).
Business Asset Disposal Relief can reduce your tax rate to 10% on gains of up to £1m. However, this is a lifetime limit, so if you have already taken advantage of this relief in the past you may not be able to make a further claim on the disposal of your business.
The Budget on 3 March 2021 may well introduce changes to Capital Gains Tax, possibly increasing the rates or reducing the reliefs available for business disposals. If you want to be sure of benefiting from capital gains reliefs, take advice and be prepared to act quickly.
If you sell your company and carry on the business on a smaller scale as an individual or partnership, or start up the same business again, within two years, you can be caught by anti-avoidance legislation which will tax the capital gain as income.
