What Is a P60?
A P60 is the certificate your employer gives you after the end of the tax year, summarising everything you were paid and everything that was deducted in that job. Its formal name is the End of Year Certificate, and it covers the full tax year to 5 April.
You get one if you are still on the payroll on 5 April. Your employer has until 31 May to hand it over, on paper or electronically. If you hold two jobs on 5 April, you get two P60s, one from each employer.
That is the mechanical answer. The more useful answer is that the P60 is the document other people ask you for. HMRC already has every figure on it, submitted payday by payday under Real Time Information. Your mortgage lender does not. Neither does the visa caseworker, the letting agent, the student finance office or the council. The P60 exists because those organisations want one signed sheet of paper with an employer's name on it, rather than your word about what you earn.
Who Gets a P60 and Who Does Not
The test is narrow and it catches people out. You get a P60 if you were working for that employer on 5 April. Not before, not after. The rule comes straight from HMRC's own guidance to employers: issue a P60 to everyone on the payroll at 5 April, and do not issue one to anyone who had already left.
So the following people get a P60:
- Employees on the payroll on 5 April, including part time, temporary and zero hours staff.
- Company directors drawing a salary through PAYE, even a small one. For a lot of directors this is their only PAYE document all year.
- Pensioners drawing a workplace or private pension, issued by the pension provider rather than an employer.
- Anyone on maternity, paternity, adoption or sick leave, because they are still employed. Your statutory maternity pay or statutory sick pay shows on the form.
And the following people get nothing:
- Anyone who left before 5 April. They get a P45 instead.
- Sole traders and the self employed, who are not on anyone's payroll. More on what they use instead further down.
- Anyone paid outside PAYE entirely.
There is one quiet rule worth knowing. If you worked for the same employer twice in one tax year, left and came back, you still get one P60, not two. HMRC is explicit about that in its PAYE manual. The form is per employer per year, not per contract.
The March leaver gap
Here is the version of that rule that costs people real money. If you leave a job in, say, late March and do not start a new one before 5 April, you get no P60 at all for that tax year. Eleven and a half months of earnings, and the only paperwork you hold is a P45.
That is fine as far as HMRC is concerned, because HMRC already has the data. It is not fine when you apply for a mortgage in the autumn and the lender asks for your last two P60s. We see this every year, and the fix is always the same scramble: request a statement of employment history from HMRC, or dig out the P45 and a stack of payslips and hope the underwriter accepts them.
If you are planning to leave a job and planning to borrow, the timing of your leaving date matters more than most people realise. Leaving on 6 April rather than 31 March costs you nothing and gets you a full P60.
When Do You Get Your P60?
The legal deadline is 31 May following the end of the tax year. So the P60 covering the 2025/26 tax year had to reach you by 31 May 2026, and the one covering 2026/27 is due by 31 May 2027.
In practice most employers issue them in April, shortly after their final payroll submission. The two month window exists so that payroll teams can correct errors before certifying the figures, not because HMRC is waiting for anything.
That gap between HMRC having the data and you receiving the certificate is the thing most people misread. Your employer's final Full Payment Submission goes in on or before the last payday of the year. HMRC's records are complete in early April. The 31 May date is purely about giving you your copy.
| Date | What happens |
|---|---|
| 5 April | Tax year ends. Whoever is on the payroll now gets a P60 |
| On or before final payday | Employer sends final FPS to HMRC |
| 6 April | New tax year starts, new codes apply |
| 31 May | Deadline for employers to issue P60s |
| 6 July | Deadline for P11D benefits reporting |
There is a practical consequence of that table. June is the best month of the year to apply for a mortgage. Your P60 has landed, your P11D has either landed or is about to, and you are holding the most complete picture of your income that you will hold at any point in the next twelve months.
What Is on a P60: Every Box Explained
A P60 looks busier than it is. It splits into four blocks.
Pay and Income Tax details
This is the block lenders care about, and it has three rows:
- In previous employment(s) shows pay and tax from any earlier job in the same tax year, carried across from the P45 you handed in.
- In this employment shows what this employer paid you and deducted.
- Total for year adds the two together. This is the figure HMRC uses to decide whether you have overpaid or underpaid for the year.
National Insurance contributions in this employment
A table broken down by contribution letter, showing the bands your earnings fell into and what you paid. Read the words carefully: in this employment. Unlike the pay and tax block, the National Insurance figures never include a previous job. We come back to why that matters in a moment.
One line in this table is quietly important. It shows earnings at or above the Lower Earnings Limit, which is £129 a week for 2026/27, roughly £6,708 a year. Earn at or above that with one employer and the year counts as a qualifying year towards your State Pension, even if you earned too little to pay any National Insurance at all. If you work part time, that single line is the one to check.
Statutory payments
Any statutory maternity, paternity, shared parental, adoption or parental bereavement pay you received during the year, listed separately from your normal wages.
Other details
Student loan and postgraduate loan deductions, and your final tax code for the year. That code is worth a glance. If it is not the standard 1257L and you cannot explain why, something on your record may be wrong, and our guide to tax codes covers what the letters and numbers mean.
The Previous Employment Trap
This is the part of the P60 that almost nobody explains, and it decides whether your P60 is worth anything when you change jobs.
If you changed jobs during the year and handed your P45 to the new employer, their P60 picks up your old figures in the previous employment row. Your Total for year covers the whole tax year across both jobs, and one document proves your entire year's income.
If you did not hand over a P45, perhaps you lost it, or started on a Starter Checklist, then your new employer never received those earlier figures. Their P60 shows only what they paid you. The previous employment row sits blank or at zero, and your P60 understates your annual income, sometimes by a lot.
The document is not wrong. It is accurately reporting what that employer knows. But if you hand it to a lender as proof of a full year's earnings, it will not support the income you have declared, and that is the sort of discrepancy that stalls an application.
So the P45 and the P60 are not two independent forms. The P45 is the input, and the quality of your P60 depends on whether that input arrived. It is another reason to hand a P45 over promptly rather than filing it in a drawer.
Two more things follow from this:
- National Insurance never carries across. Even with a P45 handed over cleanly, the NI block covers this employment only. If you want your full annual NI position, for example when checking qualifying years for your State Pension, one P60 will not give it to you. Your Personal Tax Account will.
- Two concurrent jobs means two partial pictures. Each employer applies your thresholds against their own payroll in isolation, so neither P60 shows your real total. Add them together yourself, and expect your tax position to need sorting through Self Assessment or a coding adjustment.
How to Get a P60 Online or Replace a Lost One
Here is the headline, and it is the opposite of what most people assume: a lost P60 can be replaced. A lost P45 cannot.
That asymmetry is worth sitting with, because it is backwards from how people treat the two forms. The P45 is the one everybody chases, and it is the one nobody can reissue. The P60 is the one that ends up in a recycling bin, and it is both replaceable and the document that actually gets asked for years later.
If yours has gone missing, work through these in order:
- Ask your employer. They can issue a replacement, usually marked as a duplicate. Most modern payroll software stores every P60 it has ever produced, so this is often a two minute job for whoever runs your payroll.
- Check your payroll portal. If your employer uses an online payslip system, your P60s are almost certainly sitting in it alongside your payslips. Download them now rather than when you need them, because access usually dies with your employment.
- Use your Personal Tax Account or the HMRC app. Sign in on GOV.UK and you can see your pay and tax for each year from each employer. It is not a P60, but it holds the same figures and most lenders will accept it.
- Ask HMRC directly. You can request a statement of your employment history and income. This is the slowest route, so use it when the employer no longer exists.
The one situation with no clean fix is a former employer that has since dissolved. Then the Personal Tax Account is your only record, which is exactly why we tell clients to download every P60 the week it arrives rather than trusting a portal they may lose access to.
What If Your Employer Will Not Give You a P60?
Issuing a P60 is a legal duty under the PAYE regulations, not a courtesy. HMRC can charge a penalty of up to £300 for the failure, plus up to £60 a day while it continues.
The catch is that these penalties are not automatic. Nothing in HMRC's systems flags an employer who quietly skips P60s, because HMRC already holds the underlying figures and has no particular reason to chase the paperwork. Enforcement depends on somebody complaining.
So the practical route is:
- Ask your employer in writing, and reference the 31 May deadline.
- If nothing happens, contact HMRC, who will remind the employer of the obligation.
- In the meantime, pull the figures from your Personal Tax Account so your tax return or loan application is not held up.
For employers reading this, our honest advice is not to test how rarely the penalty gets charged. A missing P60 lands on your employee at the worst possible moment, usually mid mortgage application, and it is a cheap thing to get right.
P60 vs P45 vs P11D
The three PAYE forms cover the same subject at different moments, which is why people confuse them.
| P45 | P60 | P11D | |
|---|---|---|---|
| When | The day you leave a job | After 5 April, by 31 May | By 6 July |
| Trigger | Leaving | Being employed on 5 April | Having taxable benefits |
| Covers | Pay and tax so far this year | Whole tax year with that employer | Benefits in kind |
| Replaceable? | No | Yes | Yes |
| Who wants it | Your next employer | Lenders, HMRC, visa and benefit offices | HMRC, and your tax code |
The shortest way to hold it in your head: a P45 is a handover note, a P60 is a receipt for the year, and a P11D is the list of things you got that were not cash. In a year where you change jobs, keep a benefit and stay employed past 5 April, you will collect all three.
No P60? What the Self Employed Use Instead
If you are a sole trader, there is no P60 in your life and there never will be, because nobody operates PAYE on you. The equivalent evidence is a pair of HMRC documents:
- The SA302, or tax calculation, showing the income you declared and the tax due on it.
- The tax year overview, which confirms what HMRC actually recorded and paid against.
Lenders normally want both, for two or three consecutive years, precisely because a self employed applicant has no employer to corroborate the figures. Both come from your HMRC online account once the return is filed.
This is one of the underrated arguments for filing your Self Assessment early rather than in the January rush. You cannot produce an SA302 for a year you have not filed. Directors of limited companies sit in an odd middle position here: you get a P60 for your salary, but your dividend income only ever appears on the tax return, so most lenders want both. Our guide to directors' remuneration covers how the two halves fit together, and if you are still weighing the structure, sole trader versus limited company is the place to start.
Our View
The P60 is a strange survivor. Since Real Time Information came in, HMRC receives your pay and tax data on every single payday, which means the End of Year Certificate tells the tax authority nothing it did not already know eight weeks earlier. Judged purely as a tax document, it is redundant.
It survives because it does a job the tax system was never designed to do. It is the UK's default proof of income, and the entire mortgage, rental and immigration apparatus is built around it. That is a lot of weight resting on a form that gets emailed out once a year and deleted by half the people who receive it.
Our view is that people spend their attention on the wrong form. The P45 gets chased hard, and the worst case for losing one is a few months of emergency tax you get back automatically. The P60 gets ignored, and losing one from a company that has since dissolved genuinely can cost you a mortgage offer.
So the rule we give clients is simple. HMRC only requires employees to keep pay and tax records for 22 months after the end of the tax year. That is not the number to work to. Lenders routinely ask for two or three years, so keep every P60 for at least six years, in a folder you control rather than an employer portal you will lose access to. Download it the day it arrives. It takes thirty seconds and it is the cheapest insurance in personal finance.
One last point for employers. A P60 is the one payroll document your staff will still be looking at in three years, and it carries your company's name. If the figures on it are wrong, or it turns up in July, that is what your employees remember about how you run the business.
How IAK Can Help
We run payroll for employers across North London, which means submitting the final FPS on time, producing accurate P60s for every employee before the 31 May deadline, and handling the P11D reporting that follows in July. For directors, we set salary, code and dividends up so that your P60 and your tax return tell a consistent story, which is exactly what a lender is checking.
If you are an employee whose P60 has gone missing, or whose figures look wrong, our personal tax team can check your record against HMRC's and put right anything that has been overpaid. To see how a tax code turns into take home pay, try our salary calculator, and if you want someone to look at the whole picture, contact us for a free consultation.
Sources
- PAYE forms: P45, P60 and P11D, GOV.UK, on who receives a P60, the 31 May deadline and how to get a replacement.
- Payroll: annual reporting and tasks, GOV.UK, on the employer year end sequence, the final payroll report and the P60 and P11D deadlines.
- PAYE61185, HMRC PAYE Manual, on what the P60 must contain and the rule that an employee receives only one P60 even if they worked for the employer more than once in the year.
- P45s and P60s, Acas, on the position of workers who are not on the payroll at 5 April and on reissuing P60s.
- Rates and thresholds for employers 2026 to 2027, GOV.UK, for the £129 a week Lower Earnings Limit.
- Keeping your pay and tax records, GOV.UK, on the 22 month retention period for employees.