Your P60 should land by Sunday 31 May. Here's what it is, why it matters, and how to chase it down if your employer hasn't sent yours yet.
It’s a week to the P60 deadline. Your employer has until Sunday 31 May 2026 to put a P60 in your hand — or in your inbox — covering the 2025/26 tax year that ended on 5 April. Most employers will already have done it. Some won’t, and that’s where the trouble starts.
If yours hasn’t arrived yet, this is the week to act. Once 31 May passes, the conversation shifts from “you’re a bit late” to “I’m going to ring HMRC.” Here’s what a P60 actually is, why it matters more than it looks, and the exact steps to take this week if yours is missing.
A P60 is the legal certificate from your employer showing the total pay and tax deducted for one tax year — so you, HMRC, and anyone you need to prove your income to all have a single trusted record of what happened.
The tax year runs 6 April to 5 April. Your 2026 P60 covers 6 April 2025 to 5 April 2026. The deadline for getting one to you is the 31 May immediately after the year ends. Miss that date and your employer is in breach of HMRC’s payroll rules, full stop.
A P60 is a single sheet (or a single PDF). The boxes that matter:
That’s the whole document. It looks bureaucratic, and it is, but every one of those boxes will be asked for by somebody, somewhere, in the next 12 months.
People treat the P60 like junk mail until they need it. Then they need it urgently. The five common moments:
You don’t always know which of those moments is coming. Keeping every P60 you’ve ever received is one of the cheapest insurance policies in your filing cabinet — paper or digital, doesn’t matter.
There’s no longer a single accepted format. Three are all legal:
If your employer uses a portal and never told you, that’s your first stop this week. Log in, find the “Documents” or “Year End” section, and look for the 2025/26 file. Half the missing-P60 panics resolve at this step.
You’re owed a P60 from every employer you were still working for on 5 April 2026. So:
If you’re confused about whether you should have received one, the test is simple: were you on the payroll on 5 April 2026? If yes, P60 is due. If no, you should have a P45 from when you left.
You have seven days. Here’s how I’d use them.
Check the obvious places first. Spam folder, work email if you use a separate one, the payroll portal if you have one, and the printer tray in the staff room if you work somewhere with a back office. If you’ve moved house in the last year and never updated your address with HR, that’s where a posted P60 might be sitting.
Email your payroll contact — not Slack, not a verbal mention to your manager, but a written email you can reference later. Keep it short and dated:
Hi [name],
Could you confirm when my 2025/26 P60 will be issued? The statutory deadline is 31 May 2026 and I haven’t received mine yet. If it’s available in a portal I should be checking, please point me to it.
Thanks, [your name]
That email does two things: it gives payroll a clear nudge, and it gives you proof you asked, which matters if this turns into an HMRC escalation later.
If you haven’t had a reply by midweek, follow up — same email thread, polite, dated. Ask specifically: “Has my P60 been issued, and if so, how was it sent?” This is the point at which most resistant cases break, because payroll will usually realise they’ve missed someone and rush it out.
If you still don’t have it by end of business Friday, you’ve effectively run out of road for your employer to deliver on time. Now’s the moment to be specific in writing: “My P60 is due by 31 May. If I don’t receive it by then, I’ll need to report this to HMRC.” That isn’t a threat — it’s a statement of what happens next, and most payroll departments will not want HMRC ringing them.
Call HMRC on 0300 200 3300. Have your National Insurance number and your employer’s PAYE reference ready (the PAYE reference is on every payslip you’ve had this year, usually labelled “Tax Office Reference” or “PAYE Ref”). Explain that you haven’t received your P60.
HMRC holds your year-end data anyway — your employer sent it to them via the Full Payment Submission on or before 5 April. So even if your employer never produces a P60, you can ask HMRC for a copy of your year-end employment record, which serves the same purpose for most uses (mortgages, refunds, Self Assessment).
The deadline didn’t move. It’s still 31 May. The personal allowance is still £12,570 (frozen until April 2028), the standard tax code is still 1257L, and the document’s contents are essentially identical to last year.
What changed is delivery format. From April 2026, HMRC’s nudges around payroll digitisation pushed more small employers off paper — meaning fewer printed P60s handed across counters, more PDF emails and portal downloads. If you’ve worked at the same place for years and you’re used to a paper copy, the shift might be why you’re staring at an empty pigeonhole this year. Check your email and any payroll portal before you panic.
The other thing 2026 sharpened: HMRC’s own digital trail. Your Personal Tax Account at gov.uk/personal-tax-account now shows year-end totals from your employer’s Full Payment Submission within a few weeks of the year ending. So if your P60 is delayed, you can verify the underlying numbers — pay, tax, NI — yourself, today, without waiting for the document.
If you want to sense-check the numbers on your P60 once it arrives — whether your tax was right, whether your NI category was correct, whether your code matches what you should have been on — the NetPay app runs the calculation against your hourly rate or salary and flags anything that looks off. Free to download.
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Your employer is legally required to provide a P60 by 31 May for the tax year that ended on 5 April. If yours hasn't arrived by Wednesday this week, email your payroll or HR team in writing and ask when it'll be sent — keep the email so you have a paper trail. If they still don't deliver by 31 May, you can report the employer to HMRC on 0300 200 3300, and HMRC can issue you a duplicate from their own records.
No. A P60 is only issued to people who were still employed by that company on 5 April. If you left mid-year, you should have received a P45 when you finished — that document covers your pay and tax with that employer up to your leaving date. Your final P60 covers only your current job on the year-end date.
Your employer is not required to issue a replacement, but most will. Ask payroll for a duplicate — it'll usually be marked 'DUPLICATE' across the top, which is fine for almost every purpose (mortgages, refunds, HMRC queries). If your employer won't reissue, your year-to-date figures are on your final March payslip, and HMRC holds the same data in your Personal Tax Account.
No. A P60 is a year-end summary you get from your current employer once a year, by 31 May. A P45 is what you get when you leave a job — it shows your pay and tax with that employer up to your leaving date, and you give one part of it to your next employer. You can have several P45s in a tax year, but only one P60 per current job.
Want to see your actual take-home pay?
NetPay UK works out your real net pay after tax, NI, pension and salary sacrifice, for hourly, shift and variable-income workers. Free to download.
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A note on financial advice: NetPay UK calculates take-home pay based on official HMRC tax rules. This article reflects rules in force at the time of publication (24 May 2026). Tax rules change. For complex situations, consult a qualified UK accountant or visit gov.uk/income-tax.
