P800 HMRC Refund Letter: What It Means and What to Do

The P800 is HMRC's automatic reconciliation of the income tax you paid through PAYE against what you actually owed for the tax year just ended (the tax overpayments and underpayments process on gov.uk). Between roughly June and October every year, HMRC's systems crunch your year-end P60 against your tax code, your payslips, your benefits, and any pensions or savings interest reported by third parties, and post a letter telling you whether the two figures matched. If they did not, the letter calculates the difference. If HMRC owes you money, you get the option to claim online. If you owe HMRC, the letter explains how to pay or how the underpayment will be collected through next year's code.

The average UK P800 refund typically falls in the £200 to £1,200 range. Millions of UK PAYE taxpayers receive a P800 in a typical reconciliation year, roughly split between refunds and underpayments. The letter itself is one of the most-counterfeited documents in UK fraud, because the words "HMRC", "refund" and "£400" together drive higher click-through rates than almost anything else a scammer can put in a text message. Every June onwards your phone fills up with fake refund offers from a clone of HMRC's brand. The real letter never arrives that way.

This article walks the real P800 process: what triggers one, when it lands, how to read it, the fastest claim route, the scams that copy it, and what to do if HMRC's figures look wrong.

Contents

• What is a P800?
• When does the P800 arrive?
• Why you got one (the common triggers)
• How to read the P800 letter line by line
• How to claim a P800 refund
• If the P800 says you owe HMRC: Simple Assessment
• The P800 scam landscape
• What to do if you think the P800 is wrong
• What if you never got a P800 but think you should have?
• Frequently asked questions

What is a P800?

A P800 is the letter HMRC posts to a PAYE taxpayer after the tax year ends, summarising what you should have paid in income tax and comparing it to what your employers actually deducted under your tax code. If the two figures match within a few pounds, you usually do not get a P800 at all; the system only generates one when there is an actual difference to communicate.

The letter does three jobs. It reports the figures HMRC holds for every PAYE source you had during the year (employments, pensions, statutory pay). It applies your tax code, personal allowance, marriage allowance, and any reliefs HMRC knows about. It calculates the difference between what was withheld and what was owed.

There is no Self Assessment connection. P800 covers people whose tax situation is simple enough that HMRC can settle the year automatically. The moment your circumstances cross into Self Assessment territory (self-employment, untaxed income above £2,500, capital gains, the High Income Child Benefit Charge), the Self Assessment return replaces the P800 path entirely. If you file Self Assessment, no P800 will arrive; the return is the reconciliation.

The form is governed by the PAYE Manual section PAYE96005. The same calculation, with a different cover sheet, is called a "Simple Assessment" when it produces an underpayment that HMRC cannot collect through coding.

When does the P800 arrive?

HMRC's reconciliation cycle runs through the summer and autumn after the tax year ends on 5 April. Letters land in waves:

• June and July: the earliest batch, covering taxpayers whose data feeds reconciled cleanly and quickly. Typically PAYE-only workers with one job and no benefits in kind.
• August and September: the middle batch, including most P11D benefit-in-kind reconciliations. Anyone with a company car, private medical, or other reported benefits usually lands here.
• October and November: the last batch. Pension drawdown, multiple-employer cases, and reconciliations that needed manual review.

Letters issued after the end of November are unusual. If December arrives and you have not received one, you most likely either (a) reconciled cleanly with no adjustment needed, or (b) are in a Self Assessment population where no P800 is generated. HMRC's published target is to clear the entire PAYE population by the end of the calendar year.

The deadlines you need to know:

• Online claim window for refunds: 21 days from the date on the letter is the deadline if you want the fastest BACS payout. Miss that and HMRC defaults to issuing a cheque, which takes longer.
• Underpayment payment deadline: 31 January following the year the letter relates to, mirroring the Self Assessment date.
• Four-year backstop: any refund overpaid in 2022/23 must be claimed by 5 April 2027 or the money is permanently HMRC's. The full deadlines are covered in the tax rebate guide.

Why you got one (the common triggers)

The reasons a P800 is generated cluster around six common situations.

• Your tax code changed mid-year. A benefit-in-kind starting or ending, a marriage allowance transfer being applied, a coding adjustment from HMRC for a prior-year underpayment. Each shifts the code and the running total of tax withheld will not match what the new code implies.
• You changed jobs and the P45 handover took time. Your new employer put you on an emergency code for a few payslips, leading to either over- or under-payment that the year-end reconciliation now catches.
• You had two PAYE jobs at the same time. Even with two correct codes (a "BR" on one job, the standard on the other) the personal allowance has to be split or assigned to one source. If HMRC's reconciliation reassigns differently, the year-end figure shifts.
• You drew pension income for part of the year. Drawdown payments are notorious for emergency tax codes that overtax the first withdrawal. The P800 is how that overtaxation gets refunded.
• You earned untaxed savings interest above the Personal Savings Allowance. Banks now report interest to HMRC under the third-party data feed. If your interest crossed the £1,000 basic-rate or £500 higher-rate PSA, HMRC catches it at year end and either codes it out next year or generates a P800 owing.
• You received the wrong marriage allowance application. If your spouse transferred their allowance but the coding was applied to the wrong tax year, the year-end maths catches it. See the marriage-allowance section of the tax rebate guide for the full mechanic.

A P800 refund of more than £100 nearly always traces back to one of the first three. Smaller refunds are usually rounding errors, the marriage allowance being missed, or a P11D benefit being applied a few months late.

How to read the P800 letter line by line

A typical P800 has four blocks. The numbers change every year; the structure is the same.

Block 1: identification and headline result

Your name, address, National Insurance number, and the tax year covered. The headline line says "You have paid too much tax" or "You have not paid enough tax" or "Your tax for the year has been correctly calculated" and gives the £ figure.

Block 2: income summary

A list of every PAYE income source HMRC has on record for you for the year: each employer, each pension provider, statutory maternity or paternity pay, the lot. Each row shows the gross amount and the tax withheld. Add them up and you have HMRC's view of your gross taxable income for the year. Cross-check this against the P60 from your main employer and the P45 from any job you left during the year. If a job is missing or an extra one has appeared, that is the dispute point.

Block 3: allowances and reliefs

Personal allowance applied, marriage allowance transfer (where the recipient or transferor), gift aid uplift, blind person's allowance, and any other reliefs HMRC has on file. The most common cause of an under-refund in this block is a marriage allowance transfer that should have been applied but was not, especially in the first year a couple claims it.

Block 4: tax calculation

The arithmetic. Income from Block 2, less allowances from Block 3, taxed at the bands shown, compared against the tax withheld. The difference at the bottom is the figure on the front page.

The "tax code applied" line is the one to read most carefully. If your code was wrong all year (a BR or 0T code on what should have been a 1257L job, an old K-code carrying a stale benefit-in-kind assumption), this is where the gap shows up. The dedicated tax code 1257L guide and the tax code checker article cover how to put a wrong code right going forward.

How to claim a P800 refund

The fastest route in 2026 is the Personal Tax Account at gov.uk/personal-tax-account. The flow:

1. Sign in with your Government Gateway ID. Two-factor authentication is required; HMRC's app delivers the code if you have it installed.
2. The dashboard shows "You can claim your tax refund" with the figure from the P800.
3. Click through, confirm your bank details (UK current account in your own name, sort code and account number).
4. Submit.

BACS payment lands in your account within 5 to 10 working days. Most people see the money within a week.

The alternative is the automatic cheque route. If you do nothing within 21 days of the P800 date, HMRC defaults to posting a cheque to the address on the letter. The cheque arrives within 14 working days of the date HMRC processes the default. Total wait time end to end is around 6 weeks. The cheque route is fine if your bank details are not currently to hand or you are not comfortable logging into the Personal Tax Account, but the online route is roughly four times faster.

A third route exists for very small refunds (typically under £50) where HMRC adjusts your next year's tax code to give the refund back through payroll rather than as a separate payment. This is called "coding out" the refund. If your P800 says "we will give you this refund through your tax code in 2026/27", that is what is happening. It costs you nothing but spreads the refund across twelve payslips.

You can also claim a P800 refund up to four tax years late. For example, a 2022/23 refund can still be claimed at any point before 5 April 2027 even if the letter was missed at the time. The form to do this is on the gov.uk Personal Tax Account; the prior-year P800 figures are stored there indefinitely.

If the P800 says you owe HMRC: Simple Assessment

When the P800 finds an underpayment, the same letter (or a follow-up labelled PA302) covers how to settle it. Three options:

• Pay the lot before 31 January following the tax year. Most people use this route if the amount is small. Payment is via gov.uk Pay Your Tax.
• Spread the underpayment across next year's tax code. HMRC will do this automatically if the amount is under £3,000 and you have PAYE income next year. You will see your code drop next April; an extra £25 a month on a £300 underpayment, for example. No interest or surcharge applies if HMRC does the coding-out.
• Set up a payment plan. For underpayments over £3,000 or where you cannot coding-out (e.g. you have left PAYE for self-employment), gov.uk offers a Time to Pay arrangement directly.

Ignoring the letter is the worst option. Interest accrues at HMRC's published rate (currently 8.25%, indexed to Bank of England base rate plus 2.5%) from the 1 February deadline. After six months, late-payment penalties of 5% of the unpaid amount kick in.

The Simple Assessment route is different to Self Assessment in two ways. There is no return to file: HMRC calculates the bill and tells you. There is also no requirement to set up payments on account; the £3,000-and-above split into payments on account only applies to Self Assessment, not Simple Assessment.

The P800 scam landscape

This is the single most important section in the article. The P800 is the most-impersonated UK government letter in fraud reports, ahead of TV licence and DVLA. The pattern:

• HMRC never sends P800 refund offers by text or email. Not in 2026, not ever. The letter is always posted. Any SMS, WhatsApp, email, social media DM, or browser pop-up that says "HMRC has issued you a refund of £X, click here to claim" is a scam. There are no exceptions.
• The "gov.uk" lookalike domain trick. Scam links use domains like govuk-refund.com, hmrc-tax-refund.co.uk, hmrc-online-secure.net. The real gov.uk domain is exactly gov.uk and the real HMRC portal is at gov.uk/personal-tax-account. A correctly-typed URL starting with anything else is not HMRC.
• The bank details ask. Real HMRC asks for sort code and account number on the gov.uk site after you have logged in with your Government Gateway ID. Real HMRC never asks for: card number, CVV, full PIN, security questions, or the password to your bank account. If a "P800 refund" form asks for any of those, it is a phishing site.
• The fake-letter post version. A small minority of scams now copy the physical letter format and arrive by post with a phone number to call for "claim verification". The phone number rings a fraudster who asks for bank details. Cross-check any P800 number against the gov.uk contact pages before you call.

Report HMRC impersonation scams to phishing@hmrc.gov.uk (the official mailbox) and forward scam texts to 7726 (which spells SPAM on most keypads). The National Cyber Security Centre runs the takedown for phishing domains and is reactive to HMRC reports.

If you have already entered details into a scam P800 site:

• Call your bank's fraud line immediately to flag your card and account.
• Change your Government Gateway password if you entered it.
• Report to Action Fraud at actionfraud.police.uk or 0300 123 2040.

What to do if you think the P800 is wrong

The most common errors HMRC's reconciliation makes:

• Using the wrong P11D benefit-in-kind figure. The most frequent cause of disputed P800s. The benefit shown on the letter does not match the benefit your employer actually provided.
• Missing a redundancy or settlement payment. The first £30,000 of a redundancy payment is usually tax-free, but the recording of that exemption sometimes goes wrong, leading to a P800 saying you owe tax on income you legally did not.
• Wrong tax code application date. The code change applied four weeks earlier or later than it should have, throwing the running total off.
• Pension drawdown emergency-tax overcorrection. The drawdown emergency code refunds itself across the year, but the P800 calculation occasionally misses the correcting payments.

The dispute route depends on whether the P800 is currently in your favour:

• Refund seems too low. Call HMRC on 0300 200 3300 with the P800 in front of you. Reference the line you dispute. They can recalculate and issue a corrected P800; expect 6 to 8 weeks.
• Underpayment you do not agree with. Same number, same process, but do not pay the original amount yet. HMRC will not pursue an undisputed underpayment for the first 30 days. If you genuinely dispute it, write to HMRC at Pay As You Earn and Self Assessment, HM Revenue and Customs, BX9 1AS, with the letter reference, the disputed figure, and your supporting evidence.
• Either way, gather evidence first. Your P60, the P45 from any job you left, the P11D from any benefit-providing employer, your pension P60 if you drew pension income, and any payslips covering tax-code change months.

If you do nothing about a wrong P800 underpayment, HMRC will assume the figure is correct after 30 days and begin coding it out or issuing a payment demand. Acting within 30 days is what stops the wrong figure becoming the legal position.

What if you never got a P800 but think you should have?

Some people are owed PAYE refunds but never get a letter. The system relies on third-party data feeds; if a feed is missing or arrives late, the reconciliation does not run for that taxpayer. Situations where this is common:

• You changed jobs near the end of the tax year and the second employer's RTI feed arrived after HMRC's reconciliation window.
• You drew pension income for the first time mid-year.
• Your employer reported a P11D benefit late.
• A tax code change you requested mid-year was not applied until the new tax year.

The fix is to claim a refund directly rather than wait for a P800. Sign in to the Personal Tax Account, click "Check if you can claim a tax refund", and HMRC's system will run the calculation on demand for any of the last four tax years. If you are owed money, the refund form pops up in the same way it would have done off a P800 letter.

The four-year backstop applies the same way: 5 April 2027 is the last day for 2022/27 claims. The tax rebate guide walks the same flow in more detail and lists the other allowances people miss.

Frequently asked questions

What does a P800 refund letter mean?

A P800 is HMRC's calculation of whether your PAYE income tax for the year that ended on 5 April was correctly withheld. The letter shows your income sources, the tax code applied, and the gap (if any) between what was withheld and what was owed. A refund P800 means HMRC owes you money; an underpayment P800 (sometimes labelled PA302 or a "Simple Assessment") means you owe HMRC.

How long does HMRC take to pay a P800 refund?

If you claim online via the Personal Tax Account, BACS payment to your bank takes 5 to 10 working days. If you do nothing within 21 days, HMRC issues a cheque automatically, which takes around 6 weeks end to end. Coded-out refunds (where the money comes back via next year's payslip) take the full 12 months of the following tax year.

Are P800 refund text messages real?

No. HMRC never sends P800 refund offers by SMS, WhatsApp, email, or social media. Genuine P800 letters arrive only by post. Any digital message claiming to offer a P800 refund and asking you to click a link is a phishing scam. Forward suspicious texts to 7726 and report scam emails to phishing@hmrc.gov.uk.

How do I claim a P800 refund online?

Sign in to your Personal Tax Account at gov.uk/personal-tax-account using your Government Gateway ID. If a P800 refund is available, the dashboard will display it. Click through, confirm your UK bank details, and submit. The BACS payment lands in 5 to 10 working days.

Can I get a P800 from a previous year?

Yes. HMRC's four-year backstop means you can claim any PAYE overpayment going back four tax years from the current year. For the 2026/27 year the windows still open are 2022/23 (closes 5 April 2027), 2023/24 (closes 5 April 2028), 2024/25, and 2025/26. The prior-year P800 figures are accessible inside the Personal Tax Account; you do not need the original letter to claim.

What happens if I ignore a P800?

If you are owed a refund and you ignore the letter, HMRC issues an automatic cheque 21 days after the letter date. The cheque takes around 6 weeks total. If you owe HMRC and you ignore the letter, the underpayment is typically coded out through your next year's tax code if it is under £3,000, meaning you will see the deduction over twelve payslips. For underpayments above £3,000 or when you have left PAYE, ignoring the letter leads to a payment demand, then interest at the HMRC rate (currently 8.25%) plus late-payment penalties after six months.

This article is general information about the UK PAYE reconciliation process, not tax advice. Specific tax positions depend on your full circumstances. If your P800 covers complex income (multiple employments, foreign income, pension drawdown, or large redundancy payments) consider speaking to a qualified tax adviser. Tax rules and HMRC processes can change at any Budget.