What does the tax code
1244L mean?
1244L means £130 of your allowance is somewhere else. With two jobs or a job and a pension, HMRC can split your Personal Allowance rather than giving it all to one.
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Get the detailed breakdown + free reclaim guideHere is the thing a single payslip can never tell you: whether the code on it is your whole allowance or just part of it.
1244L gives £12,440 of tax-free pay against this employment. That is £130 short of the standard allowance, and one perfectly ordinary explanation is that the missing £130 has not been taken away at all. It has been allocated to a different source of income, where it is being used.
- 1244L Tax Code
- An ordinary L-suffix code giving £12,440 of tax-free pay against one employment for 2026/27. The L means normal allowance rules apply. Where you have more than one source of income, this can represent a split rather than a deduction: part of your £12,570 allowance is set against another job or pension.
You have one allowance, not one per job
The Personal Allowance is a property of you, not of your employment. You get £12,570 for the year across everything you receive, however many payslips arrive.
That creates a problem HMRC has to solve. Each payer operates PAYE independently, knowing only what it pays you. If both were told to apply the full allowance, you would receive £25,140 of tax-free income and owe a large sum at the year end. If neither applied it, you would overpay badly.
So HMRC decides, in advance, who gets what. There are three ways it can go.
All to one source. The commonest arrangement. Your main job carries the full 1257L and the second one carries BR, taxing every pound at 20%, or D0 at 40% for higher earners.
Split between sources. Your allowance is divided. One job gets 1244L and another gets a code carrying the remaining £130.
All to one source, with an adjustment. A hybrid, where the main code also carries deductions for something else entirely.
The second of these is what this page is about, and it is the one most likely to be mistaken for an error.
Why HMRC splits an allowance
Because your second income is steady and predictable. Splitting means the tax is broadly right through the year rather than corrected at the end. A regular small pension is the classic case.
Because the main employment cannot absorb the whole allowance. If your main job pays less than £12,570, part of the allowance would go unused there. Moving the surplus to another source lets you actually use it.
Because you asked. You can tell HMRC how you would like your allowance allocated where you have more than one source.
The third point deserves emphasis, because most people do not know it. If the split HMRC chose does not suit you, it is not fixed.
Worked example: 1244L on a £24,000 job
Someone earning £24,000 in their main job, with £130 of allowance set against a second small source.
- Gross salary from this job: £24,000
- Subtract the 1244L allowance: £24,000 minus £12,440 = £11,560 of taxable income
- All within the basic rate band, taxed at 20%
- Income tax on this employment: £2,312
- Monthly tax-free pay from this job: £12,440 divided by 12 = £1,036.67
Against the standard 1257L, the tax on this job is £26 higher. But if the £130 is genuinely being used at the other source, the household position is unchanged: the same £12,570 of allowance is doing the same work, just in two places.
If the £130 is not being used at the other source, you are simply £26 worse off. Income tax only, National Insurance excluded, and an estimate to confirm with HMRC.
The check that actually matters
Look at every code you hold, together. One payslip is not enough.
Add up the allowances. All the code numbers, times ten, across all your employments and pensions, should come to about £12,570 in total. Materially less and you are overpaying. Materially more and you are underpaying and will owe HMRC.
Watch for two full allowances. Two codes each around 1257L is the expensive error. That gives you roughly £25,140 tax free instead of £12,570, and the bill when HMRC catches up is around £2,514. This is far and away the most common serious coding error for people with two jobs.
Check whether the split fits your incomes. Allowance allocated to a job that does not pay enough to use it is allowance wasted. If your second source pays £130 a year and has £130 of allowance while your main job is short, that is arithmetically fine. If your second source pays nothing at all any more, it is not.
Check that a job you left is not still holding some. A closed employment that HMRC still thinks is live can hold a slice of your allowance indefinitely.
What happens when a second job ends
The allocation that made sense while you had two sources becomes wrong the moment one of them stops, and nothing about ending a job triggers a rebalance on its own.
The sequence that should happen is straightforward. Your former employer files a leaver record. HMRC sees that the employment has ended, releases the allowance allocated to it, and issues a new code to your remaining employer carrying the full amount. Your next payslip recalculates the year to date on the larger allowance and refunds anything overpaid.
The sequence that often happens instead is that the leaver record is late or never filed at all. HMRC continues to believe you have two sources, keeps a slice of your allowance allocated to a job that is paying you nothing, and leaves you paying tax on income that should have been covered.
The cost depends entirely on how much allowance was stranded. A £130 slice is £26 a year. A code split closer to the middle can leave several thousand pounds of allowance sitting against an employment that no longer exists, which runs into hundreds of pounds a year.
Nothing on your remaining payslip indicates any of this. The code looks like a number, and a number gives no clue that part of your allowance is somewhere else.
The check. A few weeks after leaving a job, look at the employments list in your Personal Tax Account. The old job should be shown as ended. If it is still live, that is the thing to report, and it is a more useful thing to tell HMRC than simply asking for a different code, because it fixes the cause rather than the symptom.
The same applies to a pension that has stopped and to any source HMRC still believes is paying you.
Rebalancing it
Sign in to your Personal Tax Account at gov.uk/personal-tax-account and open "Check your Income Tax". It lists every employment and pension HMRC believes you have, with the estimated income and the allowance allocated to each. That single screen answers every question above.
You can update the estimated income for each source there, which is usually what drives a rebalance. If the allocation itself needs changing, or an old employment needs closing, the Income Tax helpline is 0300 200 3300.
A corrected code applies cumulatively, so an overpayment during the current year comes back through your next payslip. Earlier years need a separate claim within four years, covered in our guide to reclaiming overpaid tax.
Our free tax code checker will estimate what your codes should be across your sources. It gives an estimate rather than advice.
People also ask
- 1244L gives £12,440 of tax-free pay against one employment, £130 below the standard allowance
- With more than one income source, this often means a split rather than a deduction
- You have one £12,570 allowance across everything, not one per job
- Add up all your code numbers times ten: the total should be about £12,570
- Two codes each around 1257L is the expensive error, worth roughly £2,514 a year
- Allowance allocated to a source that cannot use it is allowance wasted
- You can ask HMRC to reallocate the split, which most people do not realise
Related tax codes: BR tax code | D0 tax code | 1246L tax code | 1248L tax code | 1257L tax code
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