What could it mean for your money?

The run-up to this year’s U.K. Autumn Budget has been different from the norm because so many different tax proposals have been floated, flagged, leaked and retracted in the weeks and months leading up to Wednesday’s statement.

This “kite flying” of policy proposals — designed to test public and market reaction to an idea before committing to it — has attracted criticism, with analysts saying it has caused confusion and uncertainty for the public, business community and investors.

It has also made it harder to gauge what we’re going to get when Finance Minister Rachel Reeves finally unveils her spending and taxation plans for the year ahead.

Businesses have pleaded with Reeves not to launch another tax raid on them after last year’s budget saw industry bear the brunt of around £40 billion ($52.5 billion) in tax rises, with increases to employer payroll taxes and the national minimum wage.

While business may not be off the hook this year, Reeves’ promise not to repeat that raid has meant that workers, the wealthy, property and pension contributions are now being seen as other potential sources of extra revenue for the Treasury.

Reeves finds herself in a bind when it comes to the budget, having imposed strict “fiscal rules” on the Treasury, including that day-to-day spending is funded by tax receipts, rather than borrowing, and that the budget is balanced or in surplus by the end of the decade.

Those rules, accompanied by higher borrowing costs, fewer welfare spending cuts than anticipated and a lower growth and productivity outlook, have left the finance minister with an estimated £20 billion fiscal hole to fill.

In addition, Reeves is expected to want to increase the amount of fiscal “headroom” (a buffer the Treasury has to increase spending or cut taxes without breaking her fiscal rules) she has from around £10 billion to £15 billion.

Just as importantly for Reeves will be the latest economic forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) that will be released in tandem with her budget statement. These forecasts are crucial for markets and investors as assess what impact the Treasury’s plans will have.

CNBC takes a quick look at what we could get from the Autumn Budget, and the OBR:

Tax rises are never popular, but the evaporation of Reeves’ fiscal room for maneuver and a deteriorating economic outlook have made hikes an inevitabality. For her part, Reeves has said repeatedly that “tough choices” need to be made in the budget. Still, there’s some uncertainty as to where the axe will fall.

In the lead-up to the budget statement, a number of tax raising ideas have been mooted and scrapped but perhaps the most notorious was the proposed increase in income tax. The idea was controversial from the off as it meant Labour was ready to break a manifesto pledge not to raise taxes on working people, although bond investors had reacted positively to the idea.

Reeves later backtracked on the plan (which investors didn’t like) but economists say it’s likely now that she could freeze income tax thresholds, i.e. the levels at which people start to pay different rates of income tax. Given inflation and wage growth, that would draw more workers into higher tax brackets as their salaries rise, increasing revenue for the government.

Nonetheless, that move alone isn’t enough to fill the fiscal black hole and other tax rises which could be announced Wednesday. These include a higher rate of council tax on high-value properties (which has been dubbed a “mansion tax”), a gambling tax and a pay-per-mile tax on electric vehicles.

Pensions could also be targeted, with a possibility that tax efficient “salary sacrifice” schemes will be tweaked, lowering the amount that employees can funnel into such initiatives.

There could be some “giveaways” for voters too as Reeves is reportedly poised to scrap a two-child limit on welfare payments and to cut the VAT (value added tax) on energy bills. A freeze on rail fares has already been announced. Reeves is expected to stick close to her mantra that cutting the cost of living is one of her key aims.

“We’ll see a whole plethora of tax raising measures,” Sanjay Raja, chief U.K. economist at Deutsche Bank, told CNBC Tuesday. “This will be a historic budget. On our count, this will be the third biggest tax raising budget in the post-war period,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe.”

A number of economists want the finance minister to introduce several larger headline tax rises rather than a smorgasbord of smaller tax increases.

The head of the Confederation of British Industry, Rain Newton-Smith, sent a warning shot to Reeves on Monday, saying that one or two broad tax rises would be better than “death by a thousand taxes.” CBI Economic Director Mohammad Jamei repeated that call on Tuesday, telling CNBC that economic growth would help raise tax revenues.

“What we’re not seeing is that surge in business growth and investment that we desperately need to then support the government in pluggng the fiscal gap that currently exists,” he said.

Economists tend to agree that there seems to be little political appetite for large-scale spending cuts, hence the reason why most of budget shortfall will need to be fixed with tax rises.

The U.K.’s independent fiscal watchdog will be closely watched on Wednesday when it delivers its take on the country’s economic outlook and public finances.

The OBR, the public body that judges whether the government is on course to meet its own fiscal targets, could be the bearer of more bad news for Reeves, with Sky News reporting Monday that the OBR may be about to downgrade the U.K’s growth forecasts for each of the next five years.

There had already been reports last month that the OBR was ready to downgrade the U.K.’s productivity growth forecasts.