P800 Refund: How to Claim Your HMRC Tax Refund and Get Paid Back Faster

Receiving a letter from HMRC doesn’t always mean you’ve made a mistake. The P800 refund letter is good news—it means you have overpaid taxes through the PAYE system which will be returned to your account once processed. In this blog we will discuss the entire process of claiming and receiving your refund. We will also look into how to claim your p800 refund safely online, while avoiding common scams.

(If you’d like a full explanation of what the P800 form itself is and why HMRC sends it, see our related guide on What is a P800 Form? UK Employee Guide.)

Common Reasons British Workers Overpay Tax

Employment Changes Throughout the Tax Year:

Workers who juggle multiple jobs throughout the tax year frequently encounter this issue. If you started or had left a job mid-year, HMRC’s system can sometimes struggle to divide your personal allowances between different employers. This can lead to excessive deductions and taxes being taken by HMRC.

Pension and Employment Combinations:

While you receive your income through the PAYE system, drawing state pension alongside can create confusion within HMRC’s system leading to errors in tax calculations. This can later trigger a P800 refund.

Benefits and Allowances Miscalculations:

Working from home expenses, certain benefits, or allowances such as uniform costs, job-related expenses, mileage claims, and professional subscriptions are sometimes applied incorrectly by HMRC. If these aren’t accounted properly, you end up paying more tax than you should. To ensure you pay the right tax every time while utilising allowable expenses- read our blog-on what expenses you can claim for different industries.

HMRC Tax Code Overpayment

One of the biggest causes of a P800 refund is an HMRC tax code overpayment. This happens when HMRC assigns the wrong tax code to you, and your employer applies it through payroll. As a result, you may end up paying more tax than you should. Let’s understand with an example-

• Emergency tax code

Sarah started her new job. She is excited to receive her first paycheck. When it arrived, she noticed that her take-home pay was lower than expected. What she didn’t realise was that HMRC had put her on emergency tax code.

This happens when HMRC doesn’t yet have all your details like your P45 from your old job. In the case of Sarah, her wages were taxed as if she didn’t have any personal allowances, leading to her paying too much tax each month.

• BR tax code

Later on, when Sarah picked up a second part time job on weekends to earn some extra money, HMRC gave her second employer a BR tax code,assuming that her personal allowance was already used by her first job. This meant that whatever she earned from her second job was taxed at 20% with no tax free allowances.

Here, the important point to note is that – your allowance is meant to cover total income, not just the first job. HMRC applies the BR code during the year as a conservative measure, but at the end of the tax year, they review total income from all jobs to ensure you haven’t overpaid.

• Tax Code Not Updated

During the same tax year, Sarah’s childcare benefit ended. So, if HMRC failed to update her tax code immediately, she continues paying more tax than necessary.

Receiving the P800 Refund

When HMRC reviewed all of Sarah’s income from her main job, weekend job, and any benefit changes. They spotted that she had overpaid tax in multiple ways. She was then issued a P800 letter showing her total refund and explaining how to claim it.

HMRC Tax Refund Letter

Your P800 Refund, in this case – Sarah’s will be communicated through an HMRC Tax refund letter- outlining her income, tax paid, and what HMRC owes to her after recalculation. Key things to look for are:

• P800 reference number (unique to your case, and required when claiming P800 refund online)
• Letter about tax refund wording (outlining in clear words that Sarah is due money back)
• Details of Overpayment (showing exactly how much taxes Sarah had overpaid after HMRC reviewed her total income. It included extra deductions from her first job (emergency tax code), her weekend job (BR code), and any adjustments not made after benefits changed)

A genuine P800 letter will arrive by post or appear in your HMRC online account. It will never be sent by mail or text.

HMRC Tax Refund Bank Transfer

After you, or in this case Sarah, had received her P800 letter, she now has the option to get her refund directly into her bank account via an HMRC tax refund bank transfer. To complete this process-

1. She has to go to GOV.UK and log in to her government gateway account. Or, she can use the link in her P800 letter and enter her P800 reference number and National Insurance number to see her refund and choose how she wants to get paid.
2. She can then select” bank transfer” for direct payment into her account.
3. After reviewing the details and confirming the request, HMRC usually processes the bank transfer within a few days.
4. She can then check her account for refund, and accordingly keep record of the transactions.

Refunds claimed by bank transfer usually arrive within 5 working days. If you have requested via cheque, it can then take up to 6 weeks.

What to Do If You Haven’t Received a P800 Refund

Most times when you claim a refund via an HMRC tax refund bank transfer, the money owed is processed within 5 working days. However, under complex circumstances, the system cannot finalise everything automatically. Hence, HMRC conducts manual checks to ensure that the refund amount is accurate.

In Sarah’s case, her placement on an emergency tax code when she started a new job, to an incorrect BR code, that taxed her entire second income at 20% allowance – the system flagged her case for manual review.

What You Should Do:

• Check Your Personal Tax Account – by signing with your government gateway details and reviewing your tax calculation
• Look for messages from HMRC
• Contact HMRC if nothing changes, and have your NI number and P800 reference number ready.
• Provide any requested documents quickly.

When Sarah hadn’t received the amount due, even after claiming her P800 refund online, she logged into her personal tax account. There it showed ‘pending review’ status. She contacted HMRC and learned her case needed manual checks because she had two jobs and had been on both an emergency tax code and a BR code earlier that year. HMRC requested to submit her P60 and payslips to verify earning.

After she complied with the request, HMRC approved her refund, and Voila- two weeks later she got the money in her bank account.

Avoiding P800 Refund Scams

Where there is money, there are scams. It is important to remember by heart that HMRC never initiates contact about refund via text or mail. All genuine communications arrive by post or through your secure online tax account.

To claim your refund, always use the official GOV.UK website only. Never click on links within an email or text message no matter how genuine it looks and sounds. Scammers feed on the people’s excitement about receiving money back from HMRC. Also, HMRC does not charge you to claim your refund- the service is completely free. Ignore companies that claim to solve your queries faster with a small percentage of refund to be transferred to them. It’s a scam. Still unsure? call HMRC to confirm the letter is genuine.

Conclusion & Next Step

Once you come to know why you overpaid, take steps beforehand to prevent it from happening again. Keep the HMRC updated about significant life changes – be it- starting or stopping pension, changing employment status or modifications to your employee benefit – revise your information with HMRC and ensure your employer has the correct tax code from day one.

Regularly check your personal tax account, particularly after job changes or at the start of a new tax year. Use the official gov.uk channel to avoid scams.

If you want help making sense of your P800 refund, or you are unsure of your personal tax situation, contact the E2e Accounting team to help you. Our personal tax experts help you claim what’s rightfully yours and avoid the stress of dealing with HMRC alone.

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