Payroll year end checklist 2026/27: every deadline in order

Payroll year end is not one deadline but a sequence of them, running from the last payday of the tax year through to mid-July. Miss one and the next is usually harder. This checklist covers the full 2026/27 sequence — the tax year that ends on 5 April 2027 — in the order the tasks arrive, with a deadline table you can work from directly.

The 2026/27 year end at a glance

Deadline	Task
On or before the last payday of 2026/27	Send your final FPS of the year, marked as the final submission (or send a final EPS after it, if one is needed)
5 April 2027	The 2026/27 tax year ends
6 April 2027	The 2027/28 tax year begins — payroll records and software must be updated, new tax codes applied
31 May 2027	Give a P60 to every employee employed by you on 5 April 2027
6 July 2027	P11D and P11D(b) for 2026/27 due at HMRC; employees must have their P11D information
19 July 2027	Class 1A National Insurance due if paying by post
22 July 2027	Class 1A National Insurance due if paying electronically

Before the final pay run: reconcile the year

The cheapest time to find a payroll error is before the final submission goes in, not after. Ahead of the last pay run of 2026/27, it is worth a short reconciliation:

• Filings against payments. Compare what your FPS and EPS submissions reported month by month with what you actually paid HMRC. A mismatch now is a letter from HMRC later.
• Statutory payments. If you paid statutory maternity, paternity or similar payments during the year, check that any recovery was claimed correctly through the EPS in the months it arose.
• Employee data. Confirm names, dates of birth, addresses and National Insurance numbers are complete and correct — P60s are about to be generated from this data, and a wrong NI number causes the employee real inconvenience.
• Leavers. Make sure everyone who left during the year was actually reported as a leaver on an FPS, so they are not carried into the new year as ghosts on your payroll.

Ten minutes here routinely saves an hour of correction filings in May.

1. Send your final FPS of the year

Your last Full Payment Submission of 2026/27 goes in exactly as normal — on or before the employees’ final payday of the tax year — with one difference: it must be flagged as your final submission for the year. That marker tells HMRC your reporting for 2026/27 is complete and closes the year on your scheme.

If something needs reporting after that payday — recovering statutory payments, or a no-payment period at the end of the year — send an Employer Payment Summary (EPS) and put the final-submission marker on that instead. If you realise after filing that a figure was wrong, corrections are still possible: an additional FPS shortly after year end, or an Earlier Year Update mechanism through your software for later discoveries. See our guide to the FPS for how corrections work.

2. Give every employee a P60 by 31 May 2027

Everyone employed by you on 5 April 2027 must receive a P60 by 31 May 2027. The P60 summarises their pay and deductions for the whole tax year — including pay and tax from a previous job during the year, where a P45 was handed in — and employees rely on it for mortgage applications, tax refund claims and Self Assessment.

Employees who left before 5 April do not get a P60; their P45 dealt with their figures up to leaving. Software generates P60s from the year’s pay runs, so this step is mostly distribution: make sure every current employee actually receives theirs, electronically or on paper, before the deadline.

3. Set up the new tax year from 6 April 2027

The 2027/28 tax year starts on 6 April 2027, and the first pay run after that date must use the new year’s rules. Before it, you need to:

• Update your payroll software for 2027/28 — cloud software does this automatically; installed software may need an update applied;
• Update employee records — remove leavers, confirm starters, and check personal details are current;
• Apply the new year’s rates and thresholds — tax bands, National Insurance thresholds, student loan thresholds and statutory payment rates all reset with the new year. Do not carry figures forward from memory: the current values are published on GOV.UK and good software applies them for you.

4. Apply the new tax codes: P9X and P9T

Tax codes for the new year arrive in two forms. HMRC issues a P9T notice for each employee whose code changes individually — these come through your PAYE Online account or directly into your software. For everyone else, the general P9X instruction tells employers how to uplift codes in bulk for the new year (or to carry them forward unchanged, depending on the year’s Budget decisions).

Apply P9T notices exactly as issued, apply the P9X instruction to the rest, and clear any temporary week 1 / month 1 markers where the P9X says to. Using last year’s codes in the new year is one of the quickest ways to generate a spring of employee tax queries.

5. Report expenses and benefits: P11D and P11D(b) by 6 July 2027

If you provided benefits in kind during 2026/27 — company cars, private medical insurance, interest-free loans and so on — and did not payroll them, each affected employee needs a P11D filed with HMRC by 6 July 2027, and must receive a copy of the information by the same date.

Alongside the P11Ds you file one P11D(b) — the employer’s declaration, which also calculates the Class 1A National Insurance due on the benefits. You need a P11D(b) if you filed any P11Ds or payrolled any benefits, and note that Class 1A is due on payrolled benefits too: payrolling removes the P11D forms, not the employer’s Class 1A liability. Our explainer on P60s, P45s and P11Ds covers who needs what.

6. Pay Class 1A NIC by 19 or 22 July 2027

The Class 1A National Insurance calculated on your P11D(b) must reach HMRC by 19 July 2027 if you pay by post, or 22 July 2027 if you pay electronically. Use the correct payment reference for Class 1A — it differs from your normal monthly PAYE reference by a suffix, and paying against the wrong reference is a classic cause of misallocated payments and unnecessary HMRC letters.

Week 53: a note for weekly payrolls

If you pay weekly, fortnightly or four-weekly and a regular payday falls on 4 or 5 April, you have an extra pay period — week 53 (or 54/56) — beyond the standard year. Your software applies special tax treatment for that period, which can leave the employee slightly underpaid or overpaid on tax for the year; HMRC reconciles this afterwards, so you do not need to correct it yourself. Monthly payrolls never encounter week 53. The main job is simply to let the software handle it rather than forcing the period into the new year.

Common year-end errors

The same handful of mistakes account for most year-end trouble:

• Forgetting the final-submission marker. The year is not closed properly, and HMRC’s systems may continue to expect filings from you for 2026/27.
• Marking the wrong run as final — flagging the March payroll as final and then discovering a forgotten payment that needs another submission for the old year.
• Issuing P60s to leavers. Leavers get P45s; P60s are only for staff employed on 5 April. The mirror error — missing the 31 May deadline for current staff — is just as common.
• Running the first April payroll on old figures — last year’s tax codes, last year’s thresholds, or software that has not been updated for 2027/28. The result is a wrong first payslip of the year for every employee at once.
• Missing benefits that belong on a P11D. Private medical insurance renewals, beneficial loans and one-off benefits provided mid-year are frequent stragglers, especially where the person who arranged them is not the person running payroll.
• Filing the P11D(b) but not paying Class 1A — or paying it against the normal monthly PAYE reference instead of the Class 1A reference, so it sits unallocated while HMRC chases the “missing” payment.
• Mishandling week 53 by trying to roll the extra payday into the new tax year rather than letting the software apply the week 53 treatment.

Looking ahead: mandatory payrolling of benefits

A structural change is on the horizon: the government has announced that payrolling of benefits in kind is expected to become mandatory from April 2027, which would move most benefit reporting out of the annual P11D cycle and into the regular payroll run in real time. The detail and timing may evolve, so treat this as expected rather than settled — but employers who still report everything on P11Ds should start preparing during 2026/27: identify which benefits you provide, understand how their values would be spread across pay periods, and check the latest position on GOV.UK before the new year begins.

Working through it

Year end rewards sequence: final FPS marked correctly, P60s out by 31 May, the new year set up cleanly from 6 April, benefits reported by 6 July and Class 1A paid by the July deadline that matches your payment method. Payroll software that tracks the tax year does most of the mechanical work — Taxriva marks the final submission, generates P60s from the year’s pay runs and moves your scheme into the new year automatically. See how FPS and EPS filing works in Taxriva.