Leaving the UK Tax Refund: The P85, and Why Leavers Are Almost Always Owed

Leaving the country is the one situation where an overpayment is essentially guaranteed by the arithmetic rather than caused by an error. Nothing went wrong. PAYE simply spread your Personal Allowance evenly across a year you did not finish.

Most people never claim it, because they are busy shipping furniture and closing accounts, and because nothing in the leaving process prompts them. Here is what you are owed, and how to get it before you go.

All figures are estimates on published 2026/27 rest of UK rates. Residence rules can change the outcome, so confirm your own position with HMRC.

Why the money is there

Your tax code gives you £12,570 of tax free pay for the year, and PAYE hands it out in twelfths so your take-home is smooth. That works perfectly if you earn for twelve months. If you earn for five, you used five twelfths of your allowance and paid tax on the rest of your income at the full rate.

Worked example. Amara earns £42,000, or £3,500 a month, and leaves the UK at the end of August with no further UK income for the tax year.

The earlier in the tax year you leave, the larger the proportion. Leave in May and almost your whole liability is refundable. Leave in February and there is little in it.

Who can claim

HMRC's P85 guidance sets out who the form is for. You can claim if you:

• "lived and worked in the UK"
• "left the UK and may not be coming back"
• "work abroad full time for at least one full tax year"

And one important exception: "You do not need to fill in this form if you are sending a Self Assessment tax return for the tax year that you leave the UK." If you file a return anyway, the return settles it and a P85 would duplicate the work.

What HMRC asks you

Before you start, HMRC's instruction is to "check your P45 for 'details of employee leaving work'", because you will need it when you claim.

The form then asks you to tell HMRC if you:

• have a home in the UK
• work full time outside of the UK
• have salary still paid in the UK
• will spend time in the UK over the next 3 years

These questions are about residence, not about the refund arithmetic. Your residence status for the year determines how much of your income the UK can tax at all, which is why the answers matter and why the final figure may differ from a simple part-year calculation. If your circumstances are complicated, for example you keep a UK property and return regularly, the estimate above may not be the answer.

How to claim

Online. HMRC's preferred route. You sign in, and "you'll get a reference number that you can use to track the progress of your claim". That tracking reference is a real advantage: the postal route gives you nothing to chase with.

By post. HMRC says to claim by post if you "have not left the UK yet" or "do not wish to use the online service". The online claim route is only available once you have gone, so anyone organising this before departure is on the postal route by default.

To claim by post:

1. Get all your information together first. HMRC warns: "You will fill this form in online and you cannot save your progress."
2. Fill in form P85, print it, and post it.
3. "Include your P45 if you have it - if not, tell us why." HMRC gives examples such as being retired or a UK crown servant employed abroad.

The address, per HMRC: Pay As You Earn, HM Revenue and Customs, BX9 1AS.

How you get paid, and the trap in it

This part is worth reading before you close any accounts.

HMRC states that if you are due a repayment it will "pay you or someone else on your behalf" and "post a payable order to your address or to your nominee's address - to be paid into a bank account held in your or your nominee's name".

Then the warning: "HMRC will not pay any fees to convert your repayment into another currency, or to transfer it abroad. You may want to keep your UK bank account open until you receive the repayment to avoid any fees."

So the practical sequence is: keep one UK bank account open, keep a UK address you can receive post at or nominate someone you trust, and do not close either until the money has landed. A payable order sent to an address you left six weeks ago is the most common way this claim goes wrong.

For timing, HMRC publishes a check when you can expect a reply tool, updated weekly, which covers Income Tax and Self Assessment. That is more reliable than any fixed number, and our guide to how long a tax rebate takes covers the published timings for the other routes.

If you already left and never claimed

You are almost certainly still in time. The general limit for a tax claim is four years from the end of the tax year concerned, per TMA 1970 s43 as set out in HMRC's Self Assessment Claims Manual. As at August 2026, anyone who left the UK during 2022/23 or later can still claim, with the 2022/23 window closing on 5 April 2027.

The practical obstacles are paperwork and post, not eligibility. Track down the P45 from the job you left, and sort out a UK address or nominee before you file.

Check the rest of the year too

A leaving-the-UK refund often sits alongside other overpayments in the same years: an emergency code from a job change, a benefit in kind that was never removed, Marriage Allowance never claimed, or uniform and tool flat rates never claimed. Those are separate claims and they reach back the same four years.

• Am I due a tax rebate? runs ten diagnostic checks
• Emergency tax refund covers W1, M1 and 0T codes
• How to claim a tax refund from HMRC sorts you onto the right route for each
• Reclaim overpaid tax walks a full four-year recovery

To see what your code should have been in each of those years, run it through our free tax code checker before you contact HMRC.