# Social Security Act 1975, Section 8: Class 3 contributions


(1) Regulations shall provide for earners and others, if over school-leaving age, to be entitled if they so wish, but subject to any prescribed conditions, to pay Class 3 contributions; and the amount of a Class 3 contribution shall be £190.
(2) Payment of Class 3 contributions shall be allowed only with a view to enabling the contributor to satisfy contribution conditions of entitlement to benefit by acquiring the requisite earnings factor for the purposes described in section 13 in Part II below; and regulations—
(a) may provide for Class 3 contributions, although paid in one tax year, to be appropriated in prescribed circumstances to the earnings factor of another tax year; and
(b) shall provide for the return of such contributions which have been paid, where they are insufficient to provide any entitlement or additional entitlement.
(3) Where for any tax year a contributor's earnings factor derived from his Class 1 or Class 2 contributions (or both) already stands at a figure which is 50 times that year's lower earnings limit for Class 1 contributions, no Class 3 contributions shall be payable by him in respect of the year ; and if Class 3 contributions are paid in such number that the contributor's earnings factor will exceed that figure, so much of those contributions as brings the earnings factor above that figure—
(a) shall be repaid to him (subject to regulations excluding repayment where the amount in question is inconsiderable) ; and
(b) if repayable, shall then be treated as not having been paid for any purposes other than those of this section.

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Source: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1975/14/section/8 (the official version)
Page: https://openlegislation.uk/social-security-act-1975/section-8
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Source: legislation.gov.uk, The National Archives.