P60, P45 and P11D: which forms you must give employees, and when

Three forms account for most of the paperwork an employer owes its employees: the P60 at the end of each tax year, the P45 when someone leaves, and the P11D where benefits in kind were provided. Each has its own trigger, its own deadline, and situations where it is not needed at all. This guide sets out all three side by side.

The three forms compared

Form	What it is	Who gets it	Deadline
P60	Annual summary of pay, tax and National Insurance for the tax year	Every employee employed by you on 5 April	31 May following the tax year end
P45	Record of pay, tax and tax code up to the date an employment ends	Every employee who leaves	No fixed statutory date — “without unreasonable delay”
P11D	Statement of taxable expenses and benefits provided in the tax year	Each employee who received benefits not taxed through payroll (copy of the information to the employee; form to HMRC)	6 July following the tax year end

The P60: the annual summary

The P60 is the employee’s certificate of what they earned and what was deducted across the whole tax year (6 April to 5 April). It shows total pay, tax deducted, National Insurance, and where relevant statutory payments and student loan deductions — including figures from a previous employment in the same year where the employee handed you a P45 when they joined.

Two rules define who gets one and when:

• It goes to everyone employed by you on 5 April, the last day of the tax year;
• It must be given by 31 May — electronically or on paper, either is acceptable.

Employees who left before 5 April do not get a P60 from you; their P45 was their record. If an employee loses a P60 you may give a replacement marked as a duplicate — HMRC itself does not reissue them. Because the P60 is generated from the year’s pay runs, accuracy is really a question of whether every pay run and correction during the year was filed properly; the full year-end sequence is in our payroll year end checklist.

The P45: when an employee leaves

The P45 records an employee’s tax code, and their pay and tax so far in the current tax year, up to the date they leave. Its purpose is continuity: it lets the next employer carry on deducting the right tax rather than starting blind.

The form has several parts, each with a job:

• Part 1 — the employer’s copy of the leaving information, which reaches HMRC through your payroll: you report the leaving date on the Full Payment Submission rather than posting a form;
• Part 1A — for the employee to keep for their own records (useful later for tax refund claims and Self Assessment);
• Parts 2 and 3 — for the employee to hand to their next employer, who uses Part 2 to set up their tax and sends the details in Part 3 to HMRC via their own payroll.

There is no fixed statutory deadline for issuing a P45, but it must be provided without unreasonable delay — in practice, at or shortly after the final pay run for the leaver. It cannot be withheld as leverage in a dispute, and it cannot be reissued if lost: a new employer without a P45 uses HMRC’s starter checklist instead.

The P11D: expenses and benefits

The P11D reports taxable benefits in kind provided during the tax year that were not taxed through the payroll — company cars and fuel, private medical insurance, beneficial loans, living accommodation and the rest. For each affected employee you file a P11D with HMRC and give the employee their P11D information, both by 6 July following the tax year.

Alongside the individual P11Ds sits the P11D(b) — a single employer declaration that also calculates the Class 1A National Insurance you owe on the benefits. You must file a P11D(b) if you filed any P11Ds or payrolled any benefits, and the Class 1A itself is due by 19 July (by post) or 22 July (electronically). Unlike the P60 and P45, the P11D is as much a filing to HMRC as a form for the employee — and it carries penalties for lateness on both the forms and the payment.

When each form is not needed

Knowing when a form is not required saves as much trouble as meeting the deadlines:

• No P60 for anyone who left before 5 April — the P45 covered them. And no P60 exists for people you paid outside PAYE altogether, such as genuinely self-employed contractors.
• No P45 to give when a new starter joins without one — a first job, a lost form, or a previous employment in an earlier tax year. The starter checklist replaces it for setting up their tax; you never create a P45 for an employment that has not ended.
• No P11D for benefits you payroll: where a benefit is registered for payrolling, its value is taxed through each pay run in real time, and no P11D is needed for it. Payrolling reduces the P11D exercise — sometimes to nothing — but note two survivals: the P11D(b) and Class 1A National Insurance are still due on payrolled benefits, and certain items (historically, beneficial loans and living accommodation) have had to remain on P11Ds. Also worth knowing: payrolling of benefits is expected to become mandatory from April 2027, so the P11D’s role is set to shrink further — check the current position on GOV.UK.
• No P11D where nothing reportable was provided — exempt items such as most business expenses reimbursed under the exemption regime do not belong on the form.

What employees use these forms for

Employers meet the deadlines; employees live with the consequences. The forms matter to them because:

• Mortgage and rental applications — lenders and letting agents routinely ask for P60s (often the last two) as proof of income;
• Tax refunds — the P60 and P45 Part 1A are the evidence for reclaiming overpaid tax, for instance after leaving a job partway through the year;
• Self Assessment — the P60 supplies the employment pages’ pay and tax figures, and the P11D supplies the benefits figures;
• Starting a new job — Parts 2 and 3 of the P45 stop a new employee landing on an emergency tax code;
• Benefit and student finance claims — income evidence requirements are frequently satisfied by a P60.

A late or missing form therefore lands on the employee at exactly the moment they need it — mid-mortgage-application is the classic case — which is why the deadlines exist.

Deadlines side by side, for one tax year

Taking the 2026/27 tax year (ending 5 April 2027) as the example, the employer’s form calendar looks like this:

Date	Form event
Any date in the year	P45 issued whenever an employee leaves — without unreasonable delay after the final pay run
31 May 2027	P60s given to everyone employed on 5 April 2027
6 July 2027	P11Ds and P11D(b) filed with HMRC; employees have their P11D information
19 / 22 July 2027	Class 1A National Insurance paid (post / electronic)

Keep copies of everything you issue. Payroll records — including the figures behind these forms — must be kept for at least three years from the end of the tax year they relate to, and in practice employees will ask for reissues and duplicates far beyond that. Storing forms digitally against each employee’s record costs nothing and answers those requests in seconds.

Where the forms come from in practice

None of these forms is filled in by hand any more. Payroll software builds the P60 from the year’s pay runs, produces the P45 when you mark an employee as a leaver (and reports the leaving date to HMRC on the FPS), and assembles P11D figures from the benefits recorded during the year. If the pay runs are right, the forms are right. Taxriva generates P60s and P45s automatically from your payroll and stores them with the employee’s record — see our guide to running payroll for your first employee for how the pieces fit together, or Taxriva pricing if you are choosing software.