P60 Tax Refund: How to Read Your P60 and Spot an Overpayment in 3 Minutes

The P60 is the most-filed and least-read document in UK employment. It arrives in May, it looks like a receipt, and it goes in a drawer. It is in fact the single best piece of evidence you have for whether last year's tax was right, because it states in one place what you were paid, what was taken, and under which code.

Here is the three-minute check, with a worked example of a P60 that shows an overpayment.

All figures are estimates on published 2026/27 rest of UK rates. Confirm your own position with HMRC.

When you get one, and who gets one

HMRC's guidance on P60s is short. "If you're working for an employer on 5 April they must give you a P60. They must provide this by 31 May, on paper or electronically."

Two consequences follow. If you left a job during the year, that employer owes you no P60 at all, because you were not there on 5 April. What you have for that job is your P45, and you will need it for the same check. And if you had two jobs on 5 April, you should have two P60s, one from each.

The three figures that matter

A P60 carries a fair amount of information: your details, your National Insurance number, NI contributions by letter, statutory payments, student loan deductions. For an overpayment check you need three things.

The first two are the outcome. The third is the assumption that produced it. When the assumption is wrong, the outcome is wrong by a predictable amount.

Watch the "previous employment" columns. If you changed jobs during the year and handed over a P45, your new employer's P60 should include the earlier pay and tax in the year totals. If it does not, you are looking at a partial picture and the check below will mislead you.

The three-minute check

1. Take the total pay figure.
2. Work out the tax due under the code you should have been on. For a standard 1257L code in the rest of the UK: subtract £12,570, then charge 20% up to £50,270 of total income, 40% up to £125,140, and 45% above. Scottish taxpayers have a six-band structure, so use our Scottish tax codes guide instead.
3. Compare with the total tax deducted. If more was deducted than was due, that difference is your estimated overpayment.

Worked example 1: a P60 showing a large refund.

A BR code gives no Personal Allowance and taxes everything at 20%: £29,400 x 20% = £5,880, which matches. But BR belongs on a second job, and this was the only one.

£2,514 is £12,570 at 20%, the flat cost of losing the whole allowance at basic rate. It is the same figure at any basic rate salary, which is why it turns up so often in real refunds.

Worked example 2: a quieter one.

A 1000L code gives £10,000 of tax free pay instead of £12,570, usually because a deduction of £2,570 was sitting in the code: a company car, medical cover, or an estimate of untaxed interest. If that deduction was correct, the tax is correct. If the benefit had ended, it was not.

£2,570 of missing allowance at 20% is £514. Small enough to ignore, large enough to be worth ten minutes, and it recurs every year the deduction stays in place.

What a P60 cannot tell you

It will not tell you whether your code was right. It only tells you what code was used, which is why step 2 of the check exists.

It will not show a benefit in kind directly. Benefits are reported on a P11D and appear on your P60 only indirectly, as the reduced allowance inside your code.

It covers one employment. If you had two jobs, you need both P60s, and the interesting question is which one carried your Personal Allowance. It should be the higher-paying one.

And it is not a claim. A P60 evidences a claim you then have to make.

What to do with what you find

If the year has already ended and the code looks wrong, use Check your Income Tax for previous years. Compare HMRC's calculation against the P60 figures, and where they disagree, contact HMRC with the tax year, the employer, the amounts on the P60 and what you believe the correct position to be. Specific beats general every time.

If a P800 arrived for that year, the P60 is how you check it. HMRC builds the P800 from figures your employer reported, so a P800 income line that does not match your P60 is the whole ballgame.

If the same problem is still running in the current year, correct the code in your Personal Tax Account and the overpayment comes back through payroll rather than as a claim. See what to do about a wrong tax code.

You can go back four tax years, so 2022/23 is still claimable until 5 April 2027 under the limit set out in HMRC's Self Assessment Claims Manual at TMA 1970 s43. If you have kept four P60s, you have four checks to do, and they take about ten minutes together.

Our free tax code checker does step 2 of the check for you, for any year back to 2022/23, and the full reclaim guide covers the whole recovery.

If you have lost it

HMRC's guidance: "If you've lost your P60, ask your employer for a replacement." If you cannot get one, you can either "use your personal tax account or the HMRC app to find the information that would be on the P60" or "contact HM Revenue and Customs and ask for the information that would be on the P60".

For the check above, the personal tax account route is usually faster than chasing a former employer, and the figures are HMRC's own, which is what you will be arguing about anyway.