How far behind
is HMRC today?

How to read the tracker

Every refund you can claim from HMRC sits in a queue, and each queue moves at its own speed. A refund of tax taken from your wages, a P87 claim for work expenses, a Self Assessment repayment and a National Insurance refund are handled by different teams, and a claim that arrives by post is handled differently again from one made online. That is why a single answer to “how long does a tax refund take” is never right for everyone.

For each route the tracker shows two things HMRC publishes. The first is the date of the claims HMRC is working on right now. If that date is five weeks ago, a claim you sent today joins the back of roughly five weeks of other people's claims. The second is HMRC's reply date for a claim sent today, which is the date HMRC asks you not to chase before. The estimator above works that second figure out for any date you sent your own claim, using the same rule HMRC's tool uses.

HMRC describes every one of these dates as an estimate that may change. They are still the best public signal there is, because they come from the department doing the work rather than from forum anecdotes.

Why the same refund can take weeks or more than a year

The widest gaps on the tracker are between online and postal claims for the same refund. On 3 October 2026, HMRC was working on National Insurance refund requests sent by post on 5 September 2025, 13 months earlier, and gave a reply date of 26 October 2027 for a postal request sent that day. A posted form has to be opened, scanned, indexed and keyed before anyone can look at it. An online claim skips all of that and arrives already in the shape HMRC's systems need.

The second reason is checking. Self Assessment refunds carry an extra warning in HMRC's tool: even after the reply date, it may need up to 12 more weeks to issue the money while security checks run. Refunds are a target for fraud, so a large repayment, a first repayment to a new bank account or a return that looks unusual against your history can be held for a manual look. A hold is not an accusation; it is the price of HMRC not paying refunds to people who have stolen someone else's identity.

The third is the calendar. Refund work competes with the 31 January Self Assessment deadline and with the spring, when the previous tax year closes on 5 April and PAYE records are reconciled. The tracker's history shows each year's pattern as it builds, which is something no single visit to HMRC's tool can tell you.

Four ways to get your refund sooner

1. Claim online wherever HMRC allows it. Your HMRC online account and the HMRC app take most PAYE, P87 and Self Assessment claims, and on HMRC's own figures the online queue is the faster one, sometimes by months.
2. Give HMRC your bank details. If HMRC sends you a P800 that lets you claim online, a bank transfer arrives within 5 working days of the claim; asking for a cheque instead means waiting up to 6 weeks, according to GOV.UK.
3. Send it once, completely. A second claim for the same refund does not jump the queue; it creates a duplicate someone has to match up. Missing P60s, wrong NI numbers and unsigned forms are what turn a reply into a letter asking for more.
4. Know your date, then chase on it. Ringing before HMRC's reply date gets you told to wait. Ringing the day after, with your send date and reference to hand, gets your claim looked at.

Check you are owed the right amount first

Waiting is only worth it if the claim is right. Many PAYE refunds start with a tax code that was wrong for part of the year, and HMRC's end-of-year P800 calculation inherits whatever error that code carried. Before you chase a refund, run your code through the free tax code checker, or check a P800 figure across every year you can still claim with the P800 refund checker. You can claim back four years, so 2022/23 is still open until 5 April 2027.

You do not need a refund company. They typically keep a share of whatever HMRC repays for a claim you can make yourself for nothing, and every route on this tracker can be claimed directly.

For the full picture of refund timings, including P800 letters, cheques and the reasons a claim stalls, read how long a tax refund takes from HMRC.

How this tracker works

Every morning a TapTax service walks HMRC's “Check when you can expect a reply from HMRC” tool exactly as a member of the public would, once for each refund route and each way of claiming, with that day as the date the claim was sent. It records HMRC's answer word for word: the reply date, the date of the claims being processed and any extra repayment period. Nothing is modelled or adjusted. If HMRC changes its wording and a route cannot be read with certainty, that route is left out for the day rather than guessed.

We checked the estimator against HMRC's tool on several routes and send dates before publishing it, and it matched HMRC's answer to the day each time. The underlying figures are Crown copyright and are reproduced under the Open Government Licence v3.0. TapTax is not part of HMRC.