How to read your P60 and P45

What a P60 is for

A P60 is an end-of-tax-year summary your employer must give you by 31 May if you're still employed by them on 5 April. It shows your total pay and total tax deducted for that employment across the whole tax year, your final tax code, and your National Insurance number and contributions. If you had more than one job during the year, you'll get a separate P60 from each employer you were still with at the end of the tax year — it doesn't combine multiple jobs into one document.

What a P45 is for

A P45 is issued when you leave a job, at any point in the tax year, rather than at the year's end. It shows your total pay and tax for that employment up to your leaving date, along with your tax code at the point you left. Its main practical use is handing it to your next employer, so they can carry on taxing you cumulatively from where the previous job left off, rather than starting you on an emergency code.

P60 vs P45 at a glance

A worked example: checking a P60 against the Salary Calculator

A simple sanity check: take the gross pay and tax figures from your P60 and run the gross figure through the Salary Calculator with the tax code shown on the P60. If your employer applied a standard cumulative code correctly all year and your pay was steady, the Income Tax and National Insurance figures should land close to what the calculator shows. A noticeable mismatch is usually explained by a mid-year tax code change, a bonus taxed unevenly across the year, or genuine payroll rounding — but it's a useful first check before assuming an error.

It's also a useful check to run every year, not just when something looks obviously wrong — payroll errors are rare but not impossible, and a quick comparison takes less time than discovering an error years later when it's much harder to put right.

Why you might need either document later

Both documents turn out to matter well beyond the tax year they cover. Mortgage lenders routinely ask for recent P60s as proof of income, especially for self-employed applicants with other PAYE income, or anyone whose salary includes a variable bonus that a single payslip doesn't fully reflect. A P45 matters most in the weeks after leaving a job — hand it over promptly and your new employer can carry on taxing you correctly from day one; without it, you're generally taxed on an emergency basis until HMRC catches up, which can mean paying more tax than necessary for a pay period or two before it's corrected.

If you're ever asked for several years of income history — for a mortgage, a visa application, or a benefits assessment — your P60s are usually the quickest way to provide it, since each one is a clean, official, year-by-year summary rather than a stack of individual payslips to add up yourself.

Common mistakes

• Throwing away old P60s too soon — they're often needed as proof of income for mortgage applications, tax credit renewals, or checking State Pension records years later; keeping them for several years is sensible.
• Assuming you can't start a new job without a P45 — a completed starter checklist is the standard fallback, and most new employers handle this routinely.
• Confusing the two documents — a P60 only arrives if you're still employed at the end of the tax year, while a P45 only arrives when you leave; you won't get a P45 just for reaching 5 April in the same job.
• Not checking the tax code shown on a P45 before starting a new job — if it looks wrong for your circumstances, it's worth raising with your new employer or HMRC before it carries over incorrectly.
• Losing a P45 and assuming the information is gone — your own payslips, your employer's payroll records, or your Personal Tax Account on gov.uk can usually fill in the same figures.