Does one pay tax on income or pay tax over income?
I come across both regularly. On seems to be preferred usage, but I'd like to know which is most correct or formal and why.
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I've never encountered tax over: can you give an example? If I google "tax over", apart from this question itself, every example on the first two pages of results is either tax over (a period of time) or pay tax over the phone.– Colin FineCommented Sep 21, 2014 at 12:54
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So you're basically saying this is wrong? Googling "pay tax over income" in quotation marks gives 24k results. Here's an excerpt from a result from the BBC: "Landlords urged to pay tax over income from renting".– RobbertCommented Sep 21, 2014 at 13:13
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@Robbert Google serves up different results for different people, but your claim that “pay tax over income” in quotes yields 24k results seems very different from what I get when Googling the same phrase, which is only nine results, all of which clearly written by non-native speakers and dealing with Burma, Indonesia, Portugal, Vietnam, etc. (Note that the sentence following the one with the landlords is “Mi Chaung Kan land plight activist gets increasing jail term sentence”, which is hardly idiomatic English, either!)– Janus Bahs JacquetCommented Sep 21, 2014 at 13:58
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1@Robbert: The BBC usage you refer to is from "BBC Burmese", which I note says about itself on that page: Our coverage aims to reflect diverse opinions and offers in-depth analysis, making sense of the news events to the listeners. We broadcast two times a day. Native speakers would almost always use for and twice there, so my guess is the text on that "subsite" is primarily produced by "not-quite-native" speakers.– FumbleFingersCommented Sep 21, 2014 at 16:25
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Good call @FumbleFingers. Those are subtleties I too fail to recognise as a not-quite-native speaker. My comment below the accepted answer adds some context.– RobbertCommented Sep 22, 2014 at 7:24
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1 Answer
I do not recognise "tax over income" and would not use it.
As you point out, a Google search gives some results for "tax over income". But:
BNC (the British national corpus) has none (it has 10 for "tax on income");
COCA (the Corpus of Contemporary American English) has none (it has 9 for "tax on income");
Google ngrams on "tax on income, tax over income" says "Ngrams not found: tax over income"
This strongly suggests that native English speakers do not say "tax over income". And indeed, if you look at the first few hits for your Google search:
- the first two are your question
- The next is a podcast of the BBC's Burmese service
- The next is about Vietnam
- The next is a forum member with an apparently Dutch name, writing about Italy.
Is that enough evidence?
answered Sep 21, 2014 at 13:52
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2Thanks for the elaborate answer, Colin. To add some context, I am Dutch. I suspected it to be a transliteration of the Dutch phrase "belasting over inkomen", but wasn't sure. I see it a lot in English articles by Dutch authors. It also explains the Google context.– RobbertCommented Sep 21, 2014 at 14:51
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1I have often had the sense of being 'over-taxed', but happily it has never been over the amount of my income.– WS2Commented Sep 21, 2014 at 17:38