P60 Deadline: What Employers Must Provide by 31 May

If you employ staff, tomorrow - 31 May - is the legal deadline for issuing P60s to everyone who was on your payroll at 5 April, marking the end of the 2024/25 tax year. With the deadline this close, here's a practical last-minute checklist to make sure everything is in order, along with what actually happens if a P60 doesn't go out on time.

Who Needs One

Every employee who was employed by you on the final day of the tax year, 5 April, is entitled to a P60, regardless of how long they'd been with you or how many hours they work. This includes part-time staff, employees on maternity or paternity leave, and anyone on a fixed-term contract that was still active at that date. It does not include anyone who left your employment before 5 April - they would already have received a P45 when they left instead, and don't need a separate P60 from you.

A Quick Checklist Before the Deadline

If you haven't finalised your P60s yet, work through this in order. First, confirm your payroll software has processed the final pay run of the 2024/25 tax year correctly and that year-end figures have been submitted to HMRC through your Full Payment Submission and, where relevant, your Employer Payment Summary. Second, generate P60s for every employee still on your books at 5 April, checking the list against your actual payroll records rather than relying on memory. Third, decide how you're distributing them - most modern payroll software allows secure digital delivery through an employee portal, which counts as a valid method provided the employee can access and print it if needed, but a paper copy remains equally acceptable if that's your normal process.

Common Last-Minute Errors

A handful of errors crop up repeatedly at this stage of the process, usually because things are being rushed. Employees who changed their name, address or National Insurance details during the year sometimes have outdated information carried over onto their P60 if records weren't updated promptly. Employees on maternity, paternity or other statutory leave sometimes have their statutory payments miscategorised or omitted from the summary. And businesses using more than one payroll system during the year, perhaps following an acquisition or a change of provider, occasionally produce P60s that don't correctly combine figures from both systems, leading to an inaccurate total for the year.

What Happens If You Miss the Deadline

There isn't a fixed, publicly stated penalty specifically for missing the P60 deadline in the way there is for a late Self-Assessment return, but that doesn't mean it's safe to treat casually. Failing to provide a P60 on time is a breach of your statutory obligations as an employer, and an employee is entitled to complain to HMRC if they don't receive one, which can prompt wider scrutiny of your payroll compliance more generally. Beyond the formal risk, a missing or late P60 causes real, practical problems for employees who need it for a mortgage application, a tax refund claim, or their own Self-Assessment return, and the goodwill cost of that shouldn't be underestimated.

Digital Delivery Doesn't Remove the Deadline Pressure

Even businesses using modern payroll software with automatic digital P60 generation aren't automatically protected from missing the deadline, since the software still needs the final year-end submission processed correctly and the documents actively released to employees, rather than simply sitting generated but undistributed within the system. Treating digital delivery as a reason to relax the deadline, rather than a tool that still needs a final, deliberate step to complete, is a mistake worth avoiding.

If You've Already Missed It

If 31 May has passed and you still haven't issued P60s, the priority is to get them out as quickly as possible rather than waiting for a further prompt. Contact any affected employees proactively to explain the delay and give a clear timeframe for when they'll receive their P60, rather than leaving them to chase you. Acting quickly and communicating clearly goes a long way towards limiting the practical fallout, even if the deadline itself has already slipped.

Setting Up for an Easier Year End Next Time

If this year's P60 process felt more stressful than it needed to be, it's worth using the coming months to review your payroll year end procedure properly, rather than waiting until next April to think about it again. A simple written checklist, reviewed and updated each year, combined with software that automates as much of the process as possible, turns what can be a scramble into a routine administrative task. If you'd like help building that kind of process, or want your current payroll setup reviewed, we're happy to help.