What Is a P60? The UK Form Most People Lose Before They Need It

The P60 is the single most boring piece of UK financial paperwork you will ever own. It is also one of the most useful, and one of the most consistently misplaced. Every employed UK worker should receive one each year by 31 May; almost nobody keeps them filed; and a meaningful percentage of people who later need one (to apply for a mortgage, claim a tax refund, appeal a benefit decision, naturalise as a British citizen) cannot find theirs and have to grovel back to a former employer for a duplicate.

This article walks through what a P60 actually is, what is on it line by line, when and how you should receive it, the practical situations in which you will need it, what to do if your employer has not provided one, and how to get a replacement.

What a P60 actually is

A P60 is an end-of-tax-year certificate issued by your employer that summarises:

• Your total taxable pay for the year ending 5 April.
• The total income tax deducted under PAYE.
• The total National Insurance contributions deducted.
• Your tax code at the end of the year.
• Your National Insurance number and your employer's PAYE reference.

If you had a single employer the whole tax year, your P60 captures everything PAYE-related about you for that year on a single page. If you had two employers during the year, you should have received a P45 from the leaving one and a P60 from the one you were still with on 5 April. If you had two concurrent jobs through 5 April, you receive two P60s, one from each employer.

The form has been around since the 1940s in roughly the current shape. The "P" in P60 (and P45, P11D, P85) stands for "PAYE." The number is just the form number HMRC originally assigned - there is no clever meaning to 60 vs 45.

Since 2014 it has been HMRC-permitted for employers to issue P60s electronically (PDF, employer payroll portal, secure email). Many large UK employers do this now. A digital P60 has the same legal status as a paper one.

What is on a P60, line by line

A P60 has more boxes than feels necessary for what it is communicating, but the key fields are:

Your details

• Surname and initials.
• National Insurance number. Used by HMRC to match this P60 to your tax record.
• Works/payroll number (optional, used by employer for internal reference).

Your pay and tax for this employment

• In previous employment(s): any earlier-in-the-year P45 amounts, carried forward by your current employer if you joined mid-year.
• In this employment: total taxable pay during this employer's tax year (or from joining date to 5 April).
• Total for year: sum of the two above. This is the headline number.
• Total tax for year: total income tax paid under PAYE.
• Final tax code: the code in force on your final payslip.

Your National Insurance contributions for this employment

Broken down by NI category letter (A is the default for most employees) with:

• Earnings at or above LEL (Lower Earnings Limit), up to and including PT (Primary Threshold). This is the part of your pay that counts for your National Insurance contributory record (State Pension, contributory benefits) but is not yet attracting any NI tax.
• Earnings above PT, up to and including UEL (Upper Earnings Limit). This is the part of your pay that pays NI at the standard rate.
• Employee's contributions due on all earnings above PT. What you actually paid.

For 2026/27 the headline numbers are roughly: LEL £6,500/year (still confirms NI record), PT £12,584, UEL £50,270. Employee NI is 8% between PT and UEL and 2% above UEL.

Statutory pay received

Any Statutory Maternity, Paternity, Adoption, Shared Parental, or Sick Pay you received during the year is broken out separately. This matters for benefit claims and for filing Self Assessment if you also have non-PAYE income.

Student loan deductions

If you have a Plan 1, Plan 2, Plan 4, Plan 5 or postgraduate student loan, the total deducted through PAYE during the year appears separately. You will need this number if you reconcile your loan balance via the Student Loans Company portal.

Employer's details

• Employer's name.
• Employer's PAYE reference (format: XXX/XXXXXX).
• Date the certificate was issued.

That is it. A P60 is just the year-in-review summary of what your employer told HMRC about you. Nothing more, nothing less.

When you should receive your P60

HMRC's deadline for employers to issue P60s is 31 May following the end of the tax year. So your 2025/26 tax year ended on 5 April 2026; your employer had until 31 May 2026 to give you the P60.

You only get a P60 if you were on the employer's payroll on 5 April (the last day of the tax year). If you left mid-year, you should have received a P45 instead at the point of leaving. The P45 covers your tax-year-to-date numbers up to the date you left.

Some practical points:

• You can receive your P60 electronically. Many employers email a PDF, upload to a portal, or print on demand from the HR system. The electronic version is fully equivalent.
• You can receive it earlier than 31 May. Many employers issue P60s in mid-April once the final March payroll has been confirmed.
• You should receive a separate P60 from each employer if you have multiple concurrent jobs at 5 April.
• If 31 May passes and you have not received it, chase your employer first. HMRC can fine employers for missed P60 deadlines but will not issue one on your behalf.

What a P60 proves and why you need it

A P60 is the cleanest piece of evidence that you earned a particular amount of taxable income and paid a particular amount of PAYE tax in a specific tax year. Several situations require it:

Mortgage applications

Mortgage lenders typically want two or three years of P60s alongside payslips. The P60 confirms the total annual earnings rather than a single month's payslip, which can be a misleading sample if you have bonus or commission income. If you are self-employed alongside PAYE work, the lender will want both P60s and the equivalent SA302 (Self Assessment tax calculation) for the self-employment income.

Tax refund claims

If you think HMRC has been deducting too much tax via PAYE (wrong tax code, leftover personal allowance, work-from-home reliefs not applied), the P60 is the document you reference to support a refund claim. You can claim back up to 4 tax years of overpaid tax via your Personal Tax Account or by writing to HMRC - which is why holding onto old P60s matters more than people think.

Self Assessment cross-checks

If you file Self Assessment, your tax return needs PAYE income reported correctly. The P60 is the source document for the figures. HMRC's online Self Assessment portal will sometimes pre-populate PAYE income for you from RTI (Real Time Information) data, but mistakes happen - the P60 is the cross-check.

Universal Credit and benefit appeals

If you have a dispute with the DWP about Universal Credit or other means-tested benefits, the P60 is the audit-quality evidence of your actual income for a year. RTI data can be wrong; the P60 is the formal certificate.

Naturalisation as a British citizen

The Home Office asks for tax records as part of demonstrating compliance for naturalisation. P60s are part of the standard evidence pack covering the qualifying period of UK residence.

Court proceedings, divorce, child maintenance

Solicitors and family courts regularly request P60s as part of financial disclosure - they are the cleanest annual income record available.

Pension and ISA tax-relief claims

Higher-rate and additional-rate taxpayers claiming pension tax relief above the basic 20% via Self Assessment need P60 evidence of income for the year.

Just having proof you paid tax

If HMRC ever queries whether you paid the right amount of tax in a previous year, the P60 closes the question quickly. The alternative is going back to your old employer and asking them to recreate the picture - which can be administratively painful or impossible (small employers go out of business; large employers' archives are not always easily accessible to former staff).

What to do if your employer has not issued one

The steps if 31 May has passed and you have nothing:

1. Check whether you were on payroll on 5 April. If you left before then, you should have a P45 instead, not a P60.
2. Check email folders and any employer portal. Electronic P60s frequently get filtered to spam or sit unread on an HR portal.
3. Ask payroll or HR directly. Most missing P60s are administrative - the request gets the issue resolved the same day.
4. If the employer refuses or has gone out of business, contact HMRC. They cannot reissue your P60 (only employers can) but they can confirm the figures from their RTI data and issue an earnings and tax history summary. Phone the Income Tax helpline on 0300 200 3300 or use the Personal Tax Account.
5. Document the request. If your employer never delivers a P60, file a formal complaint with HMRC's Employer Helpline (0300 200 3200). HMRC can fine employers for non-compliance, but more usefully for you, this triggers HMRC to confirm your records.

How to get a replacement

The dirty secret: HMRC will not issue a duplicate P60. Only the original employer can. This is because the P60 is technically an employer-issued certificate, not an HMRC document.

So:

• For current employer: ask payroll for a duplicate. Most employers can reprint or re-email a P60 same-day. Many employers cap reprint windows at 3 or 4 years.
• For a previous employer: contact their HR or payroll department. Be aware that small or defunct employers may not have records older than a few years. If the employer has gone into liquidation, the receiver or successor company may hold the records.
• If neither route works: request an earnings and tax history from HMRC via the Personal Tax Account or by phone. This is HMRC's version of an evidence pack and is accepted by most parties (mortgage lenders, courts, the Home Office) as a P60 substitute, though it is less polished-looking than the original.

Old P60s are the kind of document people learn the value of only when they need one. The practical recommendation: scan every P60 to a labelled PDF as soon as you receive it, save to cloud storage (Drive, iCloud, Dropbox - somewhere you actually use), and keep the paper original in a single physical folder. This is a 10-minute habit that pays off for decades.

P60 vs P45 vs P11D - what is the difference?

The PAYE form family confuses people because the forms look similar and have similar names. The distinctions:

A complete employment-record-keeping habit: keep your P60s, your P45s (in case the next employer asks), any P11Ds for years you received benefits in kind, and the P2 coding notices.

The honest bit about why HMRC structures it this way

The UK PAYE system is built on the assumption that employers will keep accurate records on HMRC's behalf and that employees will keep accurate records on their own behalf. The P60 is the mechanism that transfers the employer's records to the employee's records at year-end. Once a year, the employer hands over the receipt for everything they reported.

The structural problem: HMRC's incentive is to issue the form efficiently and move on. Your incentive is to keep the form 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 same problem maps onto every other piece of PAYE documentation. Most workers have no system. Building one - one PDF scanned per form, named consistently, stored consistently - eliminates 95% of the friction the next time you need to prove what you earned in 2022/23.

What if my P60 is wrong?

If you receive a P60 and the numbers do not match your payslips or your understanding:

1. Check against your payslips first. Add up the year-to-date totals from the final payslip of the tax year. They should match the P60 exactly.
2. If they do not match, contact payroll. A miscalculation needs to be corrected on the P60 itself; the employer will reissue.
3. If the employer disputes the discrepancy, contact HMRC. HMRC's RTI data is the tiebreaker - they can confirm what your employer actually filed and tell you which side the error is on.
4. If your tax was wrong because your tax code was wrong, the P60 will show the under- or over-payment. A wrong tax code 1257L (or any other code) means the P60 captures the wrong total tax. Reclaim via your Personal Tax Account, or pay any underpayment via Self Assessment if HMRC asks.

Frequently Asked Questions

When should I receive my P60?

By 31 May following the end of the tax year. The 2025/26 tax year ended on 5 April 2026, so your P60 should be in your hands by 31 May 2026. Many employers issue earlier. You only receive a P60 if you were on the employer's payroll on 5 April; if you left mid-year, you should have received a P45 instead.

Can I get a P60 from HMRC if my employer will not give me one?

No. HMRC does not issue P60s - only employers do. However, HMRC can issue an earnings and tax history summary that is accepted by most parties (mortgage lenders, courts, the Home Office) as an equivalent. Request via the Personal Tax Account at gov.uk/personal-tax-account or phone the Income Tax helpline on 0300 200 3300.

How long should I keep my P60s?

HMRC's official guidance is 22 months after the end of the tax year (for non-Self Assessment taxpayers) or 5 years and 10 months for Self Assessment filers. Practically, keep them indefinitely. Mortgage applications can ask for 2-3 years of P60s, the Home Office naturalisation pack covers 3-5 years, and tax refund claims can go back 4 tax years. Scan to cloud storage - the marginal cost of keeping them forever is essentially zero, and the cost of needing one you do not have is real.

What is the difference between a P60 and a P45?

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; it covers the whole tax year with that employer. A P45 is issued when you leave an employer mid-year; it covers your year-to-date numbers at the leaving date and is needed by your next employer to set up the right tax code. 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 at year-end).

Do I need to do anything with my P60?

If your tax position is straightforward (one PAYE job, tax code 1257L, no benefits in kind, no second income), no immediate action is required. The P60 is filed for future reference. If anything looks wrong - the numbers do not match your payslips, your tax code shifted unexpectedly during the year, you suspect overpayment - the P60 is the document you act from.

Can my employer send me an electronic P60?

Yes, since HMRC permitted electronic P60s in 2014. PDF email, secure employer portal, and printable from HR systems are all accepted. The electronic P60 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.

Further Reading:

I Will Teach You To Be Rich - Ramit Sethi - Sethi's central point is that the boring household-admin systems pay off forever once they exist. A scanned-P60 habit costs five minutes a year and saves you from chasing ex-employers for years. (Affiliate link - we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.)

Cross-references

• Tax code 1257L explained - the code that appears on your P60 (and on every payslip leading up to it).
• Frozen tax thresholds: the silent UK tax rise - why the numbers on your P60 keep buying less even when your salary goes up.
• Self Assessment tax return UK: the honest guide - when PAYE and the P60 are not the whole story.
• Marriage Allowance UK: are you missing £252 a year? - the relief that may explain a non-standard tax code on the P60.
• New UK tax year: your 2026/27 allowance checklist - the bigger annual housekeeping list.
• Take-home pay calculator - what your P60 totals translate to in monthly take-home.