If you employ people in the UK, issuing P60s is a legal requirement. Most employers know this in a general sense, but the details, who gets one, when they need to go out, and what happens if something goes wrong, are less well understood. This guide covers what you need to know.
A P60 is an end-of-year certificate that summarises an employee’s total pay and the tax and National Insurance deductions made during the tax year. It’s produced after the tax year ends on 5 April and must be issued to all eligible employees by 31 May.
Employees use their P60 for a range of purposes: checking they’ve paid the right amount of tax, applying for mortgages or loans where proof of income is required, and completing self-assessment tax returns where relevant. It’s an important document for them, which is why getting it right and issuing it on time matters.
Every employee who is on your payroll on 5 April, the last day of the tax year, must receive a P60. This includes part-time employees, employees on maternity, paternity, or other forms of statutory leave, and employees who have been off sick throughout the year, provided they were still employed on that date.
Employees who left your employment before 5 April do not receive a P60. Instead, they should have received a P45 when they left, which covers their pay and tax information up to their leaving date.
A P60 covers the full tax year and includes the employee’s total gross pay, the total amount of income tax deducted, their National Insurance contributions broken down by category, the employer’s National Insurance contributions, and the employee’s tax code at the end of the year. It also includes the employer’s PAYE reference number, which employees may need when dealing with HMRC.
The tax year ends on 5 April. P60s must be issued to employees by 31 May of the same calendar year. That gives employers and payroll teams roughly seven weeks to produce and distribute them after the year end.
Missing this deadline is a compliance failure and can result in penalties from HMRC, so it’s worth making sure P60 production is built into your year-end payroll process rather than treated as an afterthought once the main year-end submissions are done.
P60s can be issued digitally, provided employees have agreed to receive them in that format. Most modern cloud payroll software handles digital P60 distribution as standard, which is faster, more convenient for employees, and removes the administrative burden of printing and posting physical documents.
If you’re still printing and posting P60s, it’s worth asking whether your current payroll setup is making year-end harder than it needs to be.
If an employee spots an error on their P60, or if you identify a mistake after issuing them, you cannot simply reissue a corrected P60. Instead, you’ll need to make the correction through your payroll software and submit an amended Full Payment Submission to HMRC. The employee should then receive a corrected document and be made aware of the change.
This is one of the reasons accuracy throughout the year matters so much. P60 errors usually trace back to something that went wrong earlier in the tax year, whether that’s an incorrect tax code, a miscalculated deduction, or a payment that was processed in the wrong period.
FreshPay is a cloud payroll platform that automates P60 production as part of the year-end process. Once your final payroll submissions are complete, P60s are generated and can be distributed to employees digitally, keeping you compliant without adding unnecessary admin to an already busy period.
If you’re finding year-end payroll more complicated than it should be, book a demo with FreshPay and see how cloud payroll software can make the whole process more straightforward.
