Guide to stocks and shares ISAs

A stocks and shares ISA is a tax efficient way to invest.

You can put your ISA allowance into a range of investments such as cash, government or corporate bonds, property or stocks and shares. Or you can choose a fund which is a mix of different investment types.

See more about these investment types

You get tax efficiencies on the gains you make from the money you invest in your ISA.

For the 2019/2020 tax year, the total ISA allowance is £20,000.

You can choose to split this allowance between cash and stocks and shares ISAs.

Your chosen provider may offer several ways to open your account including online or through an adviser.

Basically, you need to decide which manager you'd like to have your stocks and shares ISA with, then you need to decide what sort of investments to put into it.

It's important to know that if you withdraw money from an ISA, you'll lose the tax benefits on that money.

But, you don't need to keep the money in your ISA with the same manager. You can transfer ISAs to or away from different managers. The rules say that you can transfer some or all of the contents in ISAs from previous tax years, but only the total amount you've got in the current year's ISA.

Transfers made from one ISA manager to another ISA manager in a tax year will not impact on your annual ISA allowance for that tax year. So, you could open a stocks and shares ISA to put your 2019/2020 allowance into, and open a cash ISA to transfer previous years ISA allowances into. Or you could open an ISA and put your new allowance into it, and transfer old allowances into it too.

Check to make sure that the ISA you open accepts transfers.