UK Payroll Deadlines Checklist for New Overseas Employers
Every UK payroll guide explains how PAYE and National Insurance work. Fewer of them give you a single, clean reference of the actual dates: when to register, when to submit, when to pay, and when the year-end paperwork is due. For an overseas company running UK payroll for the first time, with no existing HMRC relationship and no institutional memory of the UK’s payroll calendar, that gap matters more than it does for an established UK employer who’s done this every year.
This isn’t a guide to how PAYE or National Insurance work, we’ve covered that ground in our UK payroll guide https://www.paulbeare.com/blog/a-simple-guide-to-payroll-overseas-company/ and our payroll costs breakdown https://www.paulbeare.com/blog/an-overview-of-uk-payroll-costs/. This is the deadlines themselves, laid out as a reference you can actually check against, built for a business setting up UK payroll from outside the UK rather than one that’s run it here for years.
Below is the full calendar of registration deadlines, recurring monthly obligations, and year-end dates, in one place.
What This Checklist Covers
This is a dates-only reference. It assumes you already know, or have read elsewhere, what PAYE, RTI, and Employer National Insurance actually are. What it gives you instead is every deadline a new UK employer needs to hit, from the point you register through to your first full tax year-end, in the order they’ll actually come up.
If you haven’t registered as an employer yet, our guide to registering a UK PAYE scheme https://www.paulbeare.com/blog/register-a-uk-paye-scheme-for-a-non-uk-company/ covers that step in detail. This checklist picks up from there.
One-Off Registration Deadlines vs Recurring Payroll Deadlines
The deadlines a new UK employer faces fall into two genuinely different categories, and treating them the same way is where a lot of first-time overseas employers slip up.
Registration deadlines happen once, at the start. You must register as an employer with HMRC before your first payday, and HMRC can take up to two weeks to issue your PAYE and Accounts Office references by post. Miss this window and you risk being unable to pay your first employee correctly on time.
Recurring deadlines happen every pay period and every tax year, indefinitely, for as long as you employ anyone in the UK. These are the ones a payroll calendar needs to track continuously, not just at setup, and they’re the ones that carry automatic penalties for lateness rather than a one-off registration delay.
Why It Matters for Overseas Companies
An established UK employer has years of institutional memory around these dates, their finance team has done a tax year-end before, their payroll software is already configured, and a missed deadline is usually a rare slip rather than a first-time unknown. An overseas company setting up UK payroll for the first time has none of that. Every deadline on this list is a genuine unknown the first time round.
The financial risk is real, not hypothetical. HMRC issues millions of pounds in payroll and RTI penalties every year, and the penalty regime scales with company size and how often deadlines are missed, so a pattern of lateness costs considerably more than a single slip. Getting the calendar right from the first payroll run avoids building that pattern from day one.
UK Payroll Deadlines Checklist
Common Mistakes International Businesses Make
The most common mistake is treating FPS submission like most other filings, something that can be corrected after the fact if you catch an error. It can’t. Once submitted, an FPS can’t simply be overwritten, corrections require a separate process, which makes getting it right on or before payday considerably more important than it might seem from outside the UK system.
A second common mistake is underestimating HMRC’s registration processing time. Because references can take up to two weeks to arrive by post, registering the week before your first planned payday is often too late. Registration needs to start well ahead of any committed start date for a new hire.
A third mistake is missing the EPS requirement in a month with no payroll activity. Employers sometimes assume that if nobody was paid, there’s nothing to submit. HMRC’s record will show a gap unless an EPS is filed to account for it, which can trigger unnecessary follow-up.
How Paul Beare Helps With This
Our payroll services https://www.paulbeare.com/payroll-services-uk/Â run the full UK payroll cycle for overseas employers, registration, FPS and EPS submissions, PAYE and National Insurance payments, and year-end P60 and P11D filings, so none of these deadlines depend on someone in your business tracking a UK-specific calendar from overseas.
If you’re not yet registered as a UK employer, our guide to registering a UK PAYE scheme https://www.paulbeare.com/blog/register-a-uk-paye-scheme-for-a-non-uk-company/ covers that first step.
Questions & Answers
What happens if I miss the FPS submission deadline?
Late RTI filings trigger automatic HMRC penalties, starting at £100 for employers with up to nine employees, rising for larger employers and repeated late filings. Unlike some other returns, an FPS generally can’t be corrected retroactively, so getting it in on time matters more than fixing it afterward.
When is PAYE actually due to HMRC?
By the 22nd of the following month if paying electronically, or the 19th if paying by cheque. Most employers use the electronic deadline.
Do I need to submit anything in a month with no payroll?
Yes. File an Employer Payment Summary (EPS) instead of a Full Payment Submission, so HMRC’s record matches your actual activity for that period.
When do employees need their P60?
By 31 May following the end of the tax year on 5 April. P11Ds, covering expenses and benefits, are due slightly later, by 6 July.
Missing a UK payroll deadline as a first-time overseas employer is an easy, avoidable mistake, and an expensive one to repeat. If you’d like this entire calendar handled for you, speak to our payroll services https://www.paulbeare.com/payroll-services-uk/Â team.
