Changed jobs this year? You may have a P60 from one employer and a P45 from another. Here is how to use them together for tax, mortgages, and refunds.
Changing jobs part way through the year quietly complicates your paperwork. Instead of one clean document covering the whole tax year, you end up with pieces from different employers, and people are often unsure which is which, whether they add up, and what they are even for. If you moved jobs during this tax year, here is how your P60 and P45 fit together, and how to use them for a tax check, a mortgage, or a refund.
The two documents sound similar and get muddled constantly, but they do different jobs.
A P45 is what you get when you leave a job. It shows your pay and the tax deducted from the start of the tax year up to your leaving date, plus the tax code you were on. You hand part of it to your next employer so they can pick up where the old one left off.
A P60 is what you get at the end of the tax year, by 31 May, from an employer you are still working for on 5 April. It summarises your total pay and tax from that employer for the whole year.
The key consequence is this: you only ever get a P60 from a job you were still in on 5 April. For a job you left during the year, there is no P60, only the P45. So the normal pattern after a mid-year move is one P45 from the old job and one P60 from the new one.
This is the question that matters most, and the answer is usually yes, if everything went smoothly. When you started your new job and gave payroll your P45, they added your earlier pay and tax to your record. That means the P60 your new employer gives you at year end often shows your pay and tax for the whole year across both jobs, not just the time with them.
You can check this quickly. Look at the total pay figure on your new P60. Does it look like roughly your whole year’s earnings, or only the months since you joined? If it reflects the full year, the two jobs have been joined up correctly and the P60 is your single best summary. If it only covers the new job, the old job’s figures were not carried across, and you will need the P45 alongside the P60 to see the full picture.
Either way, keep both documents. Even when the P60 includes everything, your P45 is the proof of what happened in the earlier job, and you may need it if anything has to be untangled later.
There are four common situations where last year’s P45 or P60 earns its keep.
If you changed jobs and your new employer did not receive your P45 in time, you may have been put on an emergency code for a while, which often means you overpaid tax early on. Your P45 shows the tax already deducted, which is exactly what PAYE needs to reconcile and refund the overpayment. If your take-home looked low in the first months of the new job, the P45 is the document that explains why.
If you have to file Self Assessment, you must declare all your employment income for the year, including jobs you have left. The P45 gives you the pay and tax from the old job, and the P60 gives you the new one, or the whole year if it was combined. Entering both correctly means you are not taxed twice on money PAYE already handled.
Lenders and letting agents want to see proof of income, and for a year where you changed jobs that can mean documents from more than one employer. A P60 showing the full year is ideal. Where it only covers the new job, having the P45 from the old one lets you show the complete income history the lender is asking for.
If you overpaid tax, perhaps through an emergency code or a gap between jobs, the figures on your P45 and P60 are what support the claim. HMRC usually reconciles PAYE automatically after the year ends, but having the documents lets you check the refund is right rather than taking it on trust.
Losing an old P45 or P60 is not the disaster it feels like, because the information is recoverable even if the original paper is not. Your old employer can usually issue a replacement statement of your pay and tax. More conveniently, the same figures appear in your HMRC personal tax account and in the HMRC app, under your employment and income history, which lists each employer and what was reported for you. You cannot get a genuine duplicate of an original P45, but you can get the numbers, and the numbers are what any tax check, lender, or refund claim actually needs.
Say you left a warehouse job in July and started a delivery job in August. In July you received a P45 showing, say, £9,000 of pay and £600 of tax so far that year. You gave it to your new employer. The following May, your new employer issues a P60. If it shows total pay of around your full year’s earnings including that £9,000, the jobs were joined up and the P60 is your complete summary. If it shows only the delivery job, you keep the P45 alongside it so the two together cover the whole year. In both cases you file them away, because next time you need to prove your income, you will be glad you did.
As a rule of thumb, keep your P60s and P45s for at least a few years rather than binning them once the tax year ends. HMRC can review earlier years in certain circumstances, mortgage and remortgage applications often ask for the last two or three years of income evidence, and refund claims can be made for several years back. If you are self-employed as well as employed, the record-keeping expectation is longer still, so a tidy folder of past documents saves real hassle later.
Digital copies are fine for your own reference, and many employers now issue P60s electronically through a payroll portal. The important thing is that you can lay hands on the figures when a lender or HMRC asks, rather than discovering the portal only kept the last twelve months and the document you need has rolled off.
If there was a gap between leaving one job and starting the next, that can affect your tax too. During PAYE, your personal allowance builds up week by week even when you are not earning, so starting a new job after a gap sometimes produces a small refund in your first pay packet as the unused allowance is applied. Your P45 from the old job is what lets the new employer, and PAYE, work this out correctly. If you claimed any taxable benefits during the gap, such as certain jobseeker payments, those count as income too and may appear on your end-of-year reconciliation, so keep any paperwork from that period alongside your P45.
If you want to check that the tax across your jobs this year looks right, the NetPay app rebuilds your take-home from your real pay and tax code so you can compare it against your P60 and P45. Free to download.
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No. A P60 only comes from an employer you were still working for on 5 April, the last day of the tax year. For a job you left during the year, you get a P45 instead, which shows your pay and tax up to your leaving date. So a mid-year job change usually leaves you with one P45 and one P60.
Your new employer should have added the pay and tax from your P45 to your record when you started, so your P60 at the end of the year usually already includes the earlier job. Check this by seeing whether the P60 figures look like your whole year or just the new job, and keep both documents either way.
You need them to prove your income and tax for the year, which matters for a Self Assessment return, a mortgage application, a tax refund claim, or checking your tax code is right. Lenders and HMRC often want to see the full year, which can mean documents from more than one employer.
Your old employer can usually provide a replacement statement, and the pay and tax details also appear in your HMRC personal tax account and the HMRC app under your employment history. You cannot get a duplicate original P45, but the figures are recoverable, which is what actually matters.
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 (9 October 2026). Tax rules change. For complex situations, consult a qualified UK accountant or visit gov.uk/income-tax.
