What Is a P45? The UK Form Your Employer Owes You When You Leave

The P45 is the piece of paper UK employers slide across the desk when an employment ends. It looks like dead paperwork in the era of HMRC's Real Time Information system, where every payroll run already flows into HMRC's database the same week it happens. And in one narrow sense it is: HMRC does not actually need your P45 to know what you earned. They already know. The form is for you, and for your next employer.

That is also the reason it still matters. Without a P45 in hand on day one of the new job, you get put on an emergency tax code via the starter checklist, you overpay tax through the early months of the new employment, and you spend the next few payslips watching HMRC slowly correct itself. With a P45 you walk in with the right tax code already set, the right cumulative pay-to-date carried over, and your first new payslip looks like the second one would have anyway. The form has not become irrelevant. It has become a quiet convenience tax on anyone who lets it slip.

This article walks through what a P45 actually is, the four parts and what each one does, when your employer must give it to you, what to hand to the new employer (and what to keep), what happens when you do not have one, and the strangely strict HMRC rule that no replacement P45 will ever be issued.

Contents

• What a P45 actually is
• The four parts of a P45
• When you should receive your P45
• What to do with your P45
• What happens without a P45
• The HMRC no-replacement rule
• P45 vs P60 vs P11D
• Frequently asked questions

What a P45 Actually Is

A P45 is a leaver's certificate issued by your employer when your employment with them ends. It is the bridge between two PAYE jobs in the same tax year, or between a job and a benefit claim, or between a job and self-employment.

It summarises:

• Your leaving date.
• Your total taxable pay in the current tax year up to the leaving date, from this employer.
• The total income tax deducted under PAYE in the current tax year up to the leaving date.
• Your tax code on the leaving date (and any "Week 1 / Month 1" flag if applicable).
• Your National Insurance number, your employer's PAYE reference, and the student loan plan code if one applies.

The form has been part of the UK PAYE system since the 1940s. The "P" stands for "PAYE." The number is just the form number HMRC originally assigned. There is no clever meaning to 45 versus 60 versus 11D.

Crucially, the P45 does not cover the whole tax year. It covers the period from 6 April (or your start date with this employer, whichever is later) up to your leaving date. If you leave a job in November, the P45 shows seven months of pay and tax. The next employer uses it to carry your cumulative figures forward, so the rest of the tax year is taxed correctly against the same set of personal allowances.

Since 2014, employers have been allowed to issue P45s electronically. Many large UK employers now hand over a PDF rather than the old multi-coloured carbon-copy paper form. The electronic version has the same legal status as paper.

The Four Parts of a P45 (and What Each One Does)

The historic paper P45 came as a single document split into four sections. Even the modern electronic versions usually preserve the same numbering. Each part has a different recipient:

Part 1 - to HMRC

Sent by your old employer straight to HMRC. You never see this part. It is the formal notification to HMRC that you have left employment.

In the Real Time Information era this part is essentially a duplicate notification - the payroll run that processed your final wages already told HMRC about the leaving event. But the form still exists as the legal record.

Part 1A - your copy

For you to keep. This is the one that matters for your personal records. Keep it the same way you keep payslips and P60s. You will not get another copy.

You need Part 1A if you ever have to prove your earnings for a year that included a job-change, claim a tax refund for that year, file Self Assessment, or appeal an HMRC tax calculation.

Part 2 - to the new employer

Given to your new employer to put on their payroll file. They use it as their internal record of your previous-employment figures.

Part 3 - to the new employer (or Jobcentre Plus)

Also given to your new employer. They complete a few additional fields (their PAYE reference, your starting date with them) and submit Part 3 to HMRC.

If you are not starting a new job but are claiming Jobseeker's Allowance or another taxable benefit, Parts 2 and 3 go to Jobcentre Plus instead. The DWP uses them to set the tax treatment of your benefit payments.

In practice, if you have a paper P45 today, the only parts you need to hand over to a new employer are Parts 2 and 3. Keep Part 1A. Part 1 was sent straight to HMRC by your old employer and never reaches you.

When You Should Receive Your P45

HMRC's wording is that an employer must give you a P45 "without unreasonable delay" after employment ends. In practice this means on your last day or with your final payslip, whichever is most convenient for the employer's payroll cycle.

Most employers issue the P45 alongside the final pay run. For weekly-paid workers that is usually within a week of leaving. For monthly-paid workers it is usually within the same month-end payroll cycle. By the time the final wages land in your bank account, the P45 should be either in your hand, in your work email, or on the employer's HR portal.

A few practical points:

• You only ever get a P45 for an employment that ends. If you were still on payroll on 5 April, you receive a P60 for that year instead. The P45 and P60 are not duplicates - they cover different scenarios.
• You can receive a P45 multiple times in the same tax year. One per job you leave. If you change jobs three times in a year, you should end up with three P45s and possibly one P60 from whichever employer you were still with on 5 April.
• The P45 can be electronic. PDF email, secure HR portal, or printable from a self-service payroll system are all acceptable. The legal status is the same as paper.
• Statutory pay still appears on it. If you received Statutory Sick, Maternity, Paternity or Adoption Pay during the employment, those figures are captured on the P45 too.

If two or three weeks have passed since you left and the P45 has not arrived, chase the old employer's payroll team. The vast majority of missing P45s are administrative oversights that get resolved the same week.

What to Do With Your P45

The default routing is:

1. Keep Part 1A in your records (paper or scanned PDF). Treat it the same way you treat a P60 - file it, scan it, store the file somewhere durable, and forget about it until you need it.
2. Hand Parts 2 and 3 to your new employer as soon as you start the new job. The earlier the better - ideally before your first payday with them, so they can set up your tax code correctly from the first payslip.
3. If you are not starting a new job, give Parts 2 and 3 to Jobcentre Plus when claiming Jobseeker's Allowance or Employment Support Allowance. Or, if you are going self-employed, keep them - your Self Assessment return will use the figures.
4. If you are retiring, give Parts 2 and 3 to your pension provider so they can apply the right tax code to your pension drawdown.
5. If you are leaving the UK, you need the figures from Part 1A to complete a P85 form, which is what HMRC uses to reconcile any tax refund owed to you on departure.

The single most common mistake is putting the whole P45 in a drawer and not handing Parts 2 and 3 to the new employer. The drawer is fine for Part 1A. Parts 2 and 3 belong on the new employer's payroll desk in the first week.

What Happens Without a P45

If you do not have a P45 - lost in the post, employer forgot to send one, electronic version filtered to spam, or you genuinely left the workforce and forgot you would need it - your new employer will not be able to set up your tax code on the strength of HMRC's records alone in week one. The replacement is the HMRC Starter Checklist (the form formerly known as the P46, retired in 2013 but still in everyday spirit).

The starter checklist is a one-page form your new employer hands you on day one. It asks three categorical questions:

• Statement A: This is your first job since 6 April and you have no other taxable income.
• Statement B: This is your only job, but you have had another in the current tax year, or you receive a taxable benefit.
• Statement C: You have another job or receive a pension.

Each statement triggers a different default tax code on the new employer's payroll. Statement A applies the standard tax code 1257L on a cumulative basis. Statement B applies 1257L on a Week 1 / Month 1 (non-cumulative) basis, meaning the new employer cannot deduct any leftover personal allowance from earlier in the year. Statement C applies the BR (basic rate) code, which taxes all earnings from this job at 20% with no personal allowance applied here, on the assumption the personal allowance is being used elsewhere.

Statements B and C usually mean too much tax in the early months of the new job. HMRC will eventually catch up via Real Time Information - typically within two to four payslips - and a corrected tax code will land that refunds the overpayment through the rest of the year. The total amount of tax paid by 5 April should be roughly correct either way.

Without a P45, the system still works. RTI fills the gap. But the convenience tax is real: over those two to four payslips, a higher-rate taxpayer can have several hundred quid extra deducted before HMRC catches up. The money comes back, but the cash flow hit lands when you are usually least prepared for it - the start of a new job, often after a gap.

If you are starting a new job and you definitely do not have a P45, fill in the starter checklist as accurately as you can and pick Statement A or B over C wherever Statement A or B is honestly the right answer. Misreading the question and ticking Statement C when Statement A applies is the most common reason new starters end up overtaxed for months.

The HMRC No-Replacement P45 Rule

The rule that catches people out: HMRC will not issue a duplicate P45. This is on the gov.uk PAYE forms page in plain language. If you have lost your P45, or your employer says they sent one but you never received it, there is no formal replacement.

What HMRC will do instead:

• Confirm your earnings and tax figures via your Personal Tax Account at gov.uk. Every figure that would have been on the P45 is also held in HMRC's Real Time Information database. The Personal Tax Account shows it back to you.
• Issue an earnings and tax history summary on request, if you need formal evidence of the figures. Phone the Income Tax helpline on 0300 200 3300, or download the summary from the Personal Tax Account.
• Update your tax code on the new employer's payroll as soon as the figures from your previous employment have been processed by RTI. This usually happens within a few weeks. The corrected code carries forward your cumulative pay and tax from the old job.

The old employer can sometimes reprint a P45 for you informally, but they are under no obligation to, and many large employers' payroll systems are designed not to allow it. The form is officially a one-shot document.

The practical workaround: if you have not yet handed Parts 2 and 3 to a new employer and you have lost them but still have Part 1A, the figures on Part 1A are all the new employer needs. Most employers will accept a copy or scan of Part 1A in lieu of the formal Parts 2 and 3 and use the figures from it to set up your tax code manually. The starter checklist is then ticked at Statement A or B as appropriate.

P45 vs P60 vs P11D

The PAYE form family looks confusing because every form starts with "P" and a number that has no intuitive meaning. The differences:

A complete employment-record-keeping habit: keep Part 1A of every P45, every P60, every P11D, and every annual coding notice (P2) for as long as you can reasonably store them. The scanned-PDF-to-cloud habit costs about five minutes per form and pays off for decades. Mortgage lenders, courts, the Home Office and HMRC's own enquiry process can each ask for old PAYE forms.

Why the System Is Built This Way

The UK PAYE system is built on a slightly old-fashioned assumption: that employers will keep accurate records on HMRC's behalf, that employees will keep accurate records on their own behalf, and that the two sets of records will line up at the end of every tax year. The P45 is the formal handover between employments. The P60 is the formal end-of-year statement. Both rely on the worker being the long-term archivist of their own employment history.

Real Time Information, which HMRC rolled out across 2013 and 2014, took most of the load off the paper forms by making the payroll-to-HMRC data flow continuous and electronic. But HMRC did not retire the P45 or P60. It kept them because the worker still needs documents they can hold, scan, file and produce on demand. RTI is invisible to the employee. The forms are not.

Two incentives are quietly misaligned. HMRC's is to issue the paperwork efficiently and move on. Yours is to keep the paperwork for years in case you need it. Nobody in the system is responsible for making sure you store it well. The bureaucracy is built to assume the employee is the archivist of their own tax history, and most employees just are not.

The HMRC rule that no P45 will ever be reissued is not malicious. It is the rule because the P45 is technically an employer-issued certificate, not an HMRC document. HMRC has the figures and will share them back to you in other formats (Personal Tax Account, earnings and tax history). But the formal P45 is a one-shot artefact of the moment you left a job. Treat it accordingly.

What If My P45 Is Wrong?

If you receive a P45 and the numbers do not match your final payslip, or your tax code looks unexpected:

1. Check against your final payslip. The year-to-date pay and year-to-date tax columns on your last payslip should match the P45 to the penny.
2. If they do not match, contact your old employer's payroll team. A miscalculation needs to be corrected on the P45 itself. The employer can reissue a corrected version (this is one of the very few situations in which a P45 reissue happens, and only by the original employer).
3. If the old employer disputes the discrepancy, the tiebreaker is HMRC's Real Time Information record. You can see what the employer filed via your Personal Tax Account. If the employer's filing was wrong, HMRC will work with them to correct it.
4. If your tax code on the P45 looks wrong, that may be a downstream issue from the tax code being wrong on your payslips all year. Reclaim via the Personal Tax Account, or pay any underpayment via Self Assessment if HMRC asks. The tax code 1257L explained article walks through what a normal code looks like and what the unusual ones mean.

Frequently Asked Questions

When should I receive my P45?

Your employer should give you a P45 without unreasonable delay after your employment ends. In practice that means on your last day or alongside your final payslip, whichever fits the employer's payroll cycle. For most monthly-paid jobs the P45 lands within the same month-end pay run as your final wages. If two or three weeks pass and nothing has arrived, chase the payroll team directly - the vast majority of missing P45s are administrative oversights that get resolved the same week.

Can I get a replacement P45 from HMRC?

No. HMRC explicitly states it will not issue a replacement P45. The form is technically an employer-issued certificate, not an HMRC document. If you have lost yours, your new employer can set up your tax code using the starter checklist instead, and HMRC's Real Time Information system reconciles the figures within a few payslips. You can also see the underlying figures via your Personal Tax Account at gov.uk, and request an earnings and tax history summary from HMRC if you need formal evidence of the year-to-date numbers.

What is the difference between a P45 and a P60?

A P45 is issued when you leave a job mid-year and shows pay and tax to date at the leaving date. A P60 is issued at the end of the tax year (by 31 May) by an employer you were still employed by on 5 April, and shows the full year's pay, tax and NI from that employer. You can have multiple P45s in a single tax year (one per job you left) and zero or more P60s (one per job you were still in on 5 April).

What happens if I start a new job without a P45?

Your new employer will give you the HMRC starter checklist, a one-page form that asks whether this is your first job in the tax year, your only job, or one of multiple sources of taxable income. The answer determines your starting tax code. Pick the statement that honestly describes your situation. Statement A (first job, no other income) gives the standard 1257L on a cumulative basis - the most accurate result for most starters. Statements B and C usually mean a few months of overpaying tax until HMRC's Real Time Information catches up and a corrected code is issued. The overpayment is refunded through the rest of the year, but the cash flow hit is real.

Do I need to keep my old P45s?

Yes, indefinitely. Part 1A is your personal copy and is the cleanest evidence you have of what you earned and paid in tax during a job that ended. HMRC's official record-keeping guidance is 22 months after the end of the tax year for non-Self Assessment taxpayers and 5 years and 10 months for Self Assessment filers, but realistically the cost of keeping a scanned PDF forever is zero, and the cost of needing one you do not have is real. Mortgage applications, naturalisation paperwork, divorce financial disclosure, court proceedings and HMRC enquiries can all ask for old P45 figures.

Can my employer email me an electronic P45?

Yes, since 2014. PDF email, secure HR portal, and printable-from-payroll versions are all accepted. The electronic P45 has the same legal status as a paper one. Save it to durable cloud storage rather than leaving it sitting in your work email inbox, particularly if you are about to lose access to that inbox by leaving the job.

What if I am moving from a job to self-employment?

Keep all four parts of the P45 (Part 1A for your records, Parts 2 and 3 in case you need them later). The figures from Part 1A feed into your Self Assessment tax return as the PAYE income portion of the year. You will not have a new employer to hand Parts 2 and 3 to, so they sit in your records alongside Part 1A until either Self Assessment time or until you return to PAYE employment in the same tax year. The Self Assessment tax return guide covers the cross-over year mechanics in detail.

Further Reading:

I Will Teach You To Be Rich - Ramit Sethi - Sethi's central point is that boring household-admin systems pay off forever once they exist. A scanned-P45 habit costs five minutes per job change and saves you from chasing ex-employers and watching HMRC slowly correct your tax code. (Affiliate link - we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.)

Cross-references

• What is a P60? The UK form most people lose - the year-end sibling form that picks up where the P45 leaves off.
• Tax code 1257L explained - the code your new employer's payroll lands on if you do hand over the P45 cleanly.
• Self Assessment tax return UK: the honest guide - what to do with Part 1A figures if you have switched into self-employment mid-year.
• Frozen tax thresholds: the silent UK tax rise - why the numbers on every PAYE form keep buying less even when your salary goes up.
• UK tax brackets 2026/27 - the bands the P45 figures will land in once HMRC reconciles the year.
• New UK tax year: your 2026/27 allowance checklist - the bigger annual housekeeping list this form fits into.
• Take-home pay calculator - what your year-to-date P45 figures translate to in monthly take-home.