?Unexpected tax refund?

I probably need to actually contact HMRC for this but I just thought I'd ask & see if anyone knows what's happening. I left my last job in November last year & haven't earned anything since. Last week I did two days of locum work & I was paid today. I expected to get around £300. but actually got nearly £900. Upon examining my payslip, I see that I have been given back £581 in tax - ie the "Tax" amount is -581. Why? is it because I have already paid too much tax somehow? I really don't understand! Any ideas? Thanks

This is not surprising, just based on the initial description I would assume you have been over taxed - which is fine and not really HMRC or your companies fault based on their knowledge of your employment, leaving in November rather than Mar/Apr is the clincher here. You can apply for a government portal login and see it yourself, or phone HMRC (0300 200 3300) and wait on hold, they're often very nice & knowledgeable and can look up specifics for you based off your NI number. I don't know exactly how they'd return the money. It's worth noting that for the vast majority of people in the UK under PAYE (pay as you earn), this is all automatic and works itself out eventually. So the really easy/lazy option is to just continue working and it'll all pan out fine. If you're retired I'd call or do a tax return etc. When you are earning an amount each month HMRC estimates what your yearly income will be over the tax year, between April and November. If we assume you were being paid locum work income amounts of £150 a day this is roughly an income of £38k per year and the tax on this each month would have been taken away. But you stopped in November, so you only worked 8/12ths of the time ~£25k (extrapolated over the year) which has much lower tax. I don't know your income figures but when I ran some numbers it was even more owed back, so I'm assuming locum work pays more than your normal base. Or they were unable to refund back enough tax yet and it needs more pay through further work.

Hi . Thank you so much for your reply. You’ve explained what I thought has happened so well. I will phone HMRC today as I don’t know when I’ll be working again. I was in a full time - non locum post before with a salary of around 42k, but left on 10/11. The unexpected £581 would be very welcome if it’s really mine as I’m a bit skint at present. Thanks again.

Hi,

HMRC may have issued a new tax code which included your P45 details to generate the refund if you have not had a salary since November. You can check with payroll if this happened.

Thank you. 

I spoke to HMRC yesterday. The very helpful young man I spoke to says I’ve now paid the exact right amount of tax for this year (as long as I don’t work again this tax year, which I won’t), and that the refund is mine to keep. He says I’ll receive a letter confirming this in the next couple of weeks. So that was a nice surprise, a bit of spending money!