Form P85: telling HMRC you have left the UK

Form P85 is how you tell HMRC you have left the United Kingdom. It is short, it is free, and it is one of the few genuinely useful administrative acts available to someone emigrating — not because it changes your tax position, but because it starts two processes that otherwise sit still.

It is also frequently filed by people who should not file it, and skipped by people who should. The distinction turns on whether you are inside Self Assessment.

What the form is

P85 is titled Get your Income Tax right if you’re leaving the UK. It asks where you have gone or are going, the date you left, whether you intend to return, whether you will keep any UK income sources such as a rented-out property, and how much you worked in the UK before you went. It is submitted online through your HMRC account or by post, and it is accompanied by parts 2 and 3 of your P45 from your final UK employer.

Nothing in it is a claim to any particular residence status. You are reporting a departure, not asserting a conclusion.

Who should file it, and who should not

File a P85 if you have left or are leaving the UK to live abroad, or to work abroad full-time, for at least a full tax year, and you are not registered for Self Assessment.

Do not file a P85 if you are already within Self Assessment. That covers most people with rental income, self-employment, significant investment income, or a history of filing returns. In that case your departure is reported on the residence, remittance basis and domicile pages of the return — form SA109 — where you also make any split-year and residence claims. Filing both invites two workstreams inside HMRC that do not reconcile with each other, and the return is the one that governs.

The awkward middle case is someone who leaves the UK and retains a UK property to let. They are often told to file a P85 for the year of departure and are then pulled into Self Assessment for the rental income immediately afterwards. Where you already know the return is coming, the return is the cleaner route.

What it actually does

Two things, and it is worth separating them.

It triggers a PAYE reconciliation. UK payroll spreads your personal allowance evenly across the tax year. Leave partway through and you have paid tax on the assumption of twelve months of earnings that you did not receive, so the allowance is under-used and the tax over-paid. The P85, read together with the P45, lets HMRC recompute the year and repay the difference. For someone leaving early in the tax year the sum is often material.

It records your departure. HMRC updates its record of your address and your circumstances, which affects the PAYE code applied to any continuing UK employment, the possibility of an NT code where a treaty or a foreign posting removes the UK charge on employment income, and whether future correspondence reaches you at all. That second effect is underrated. A great many residence disputes begin with a letter sent to an address the taxpayer left years earlier.

What it does not do is decide your residence. That belongs entirely to the Statutory Residence Test, which looks at days, homes, work and ties, and reaches its answer whatever any form says. HMRC may treat you as non-resident provisionally on the strength of a P85 in order to operate PAYE sensibly, and that treatment is revisited against the statutory position when the year is settled.

When to file

After your final UK pay date, once you hold your P45. Submitting earlier means the year cannot be reconciled and the repayment element simply waits.

There is no statutory deadline attached to the form itself, but the repayment it produces is a claim, and claims to recover overpaid income tax are subject to the ordinary four-year limit running from the end of the relevant tax year. Leaving it is not costless.

If you left partway through a tax year and expect to claim split-year treatment, note that the two things are separate. The P85 reports the departure; the split-year claim is made on the return, in the year in which you are UK resident and one of the eight statutory cases applies.

What happens after you send it

HMRC processes the reconciliation and issues any repayment, typically to a nominated account or by cheque, and confirms the treatment applied. Where you retain a UK employment, a revised code may follow. Where you have UK rental income, expect a separate conversation about the non-resident landlord scheme, under which the letting agent or tenant otherwise deducts basic rate tax at source until HMRC approves gross payment.

What does not follow is a determination of your residence status. There is no certificate, no confirmation letter that settles the question, and no closure of the point. If the year of departure is ever examined, it will be examined against the SRT.

And then you have to prove the days

This is the part the form quietly hands back to you.

The P85 asks for the date you left and how much time you spent in the UK. Everything downstream of it — whether you were automatically non-resident as a leaver, whether the full-time overseas work route applies, whether you fall inside a ties band, whether split-year treatment is available — depends on a day count that you assert and, if asked, must be able to evidence.

The UK counts a day as a UK day when you were here at midnight, so the count is not the same as the number of days you set foot in the country. A leaver is automatically non-resident with no more than 15 UK midnight days; full-time work overseas raises that to 90 UK days. Once three or more ties are in play, the deeming rule means that after 30 qualifying departure days, further same-day visits begin to count anyway.

Boarding passes get thrown away. Passport stamps have largely disappeared within the Common Travel Area and are patchy elsewhere. Bank records place you somewhere but not reliably at midnight. The evidence people reach for when the question arrives, years later, is almost always reconstructed.

What Residay tracks

Residay keeps the record the form assumes you already have. It logs each day against a country using the UK midnight convention, distinguishes qualifying departure days from ordinary presence so the deeming rule is visible before it bites, and marks UK workdays separately because the work tie and the full-time overseas test both need them. Everything stays on your device, with an export you can hand to an accountant preparing the year of departure.

Planning notes

• Check whether you are in Self Assessment before you file anything. If you are, the return is the route and the P85 is redundant.
• Wait for the P45, then file. The refund is the point, and it cannot be computed without it.
• Update your address with HMRC as well as filing the form. The two are not the same record, and a missed letter is how quiet years become expensive ones.
• Start the day ledger on the date you put in box one. That date is the anchor for the SRT analysis, the split-year case, and any later question about when you actually went.