RTI is unforgiving: your Full Payment Submission has to reach HMRC on or before the day you pay your people, every single pay run, or the penalties start. We take that risk away. Using recognised payroll software, we prepare and file your FPS and EPS straight from your payroll figures, report your starters and leavers correctly, and act as your HMRC agent, so filing on or before payday simply happens. This page explains what RTI is, what is due and when, what late filing costs, and how we keep your submissions on time every run.
What RTI actually is
Real Time Information, almost always shortened to RTI, is the way every UK employer has had to report payroll to HMRC since 2013. Before RTI, employers totted up the year's pay and tax once, after the year had ended, and sent it in on annual forms. Now the reporting happens in step with the pay itself. Every time you pay someone, whether that is weekly, fortnightly, four-weekly or monthly, you have to tell HMRC what you paid them and what you deducted, on or before the day the money reaches them.
That single change has a big consequence: payroll is no longer a once-a-year tidy-up. It is a live compliance obligation that repeats every pay run, for the whole year, for as long as you have staff on the books. HMRC uses the figures you file to keep each employee's tax records current, to work out your PAYE liability, and to feed Universal Credit calculations for people who claim it. If your submissions are late, wrong, or missing, the effects land on your employees as well as on you.
RTI is filed through recognised payroll software. You cannot type these submissions into a website by hand; the payroll system builds them from the figures it has calculated and sends them directly to HMRC's Government Gateway. Getting the calculations, the codes and the timing right is the whole job, and it is the job we do for our clients every run.
The FPS and the EPS, and why both matter
RTI is not one submission but two, and knowing the difference matters because they do different jobs and have different deadlines.
The Full Payment Submission (FPS) is the main one. It reports, employee by employee, what you have paid them in the period and what you have deducted: PAYE income tax, employee National Insurance, student and postgraduate loan repayments, pension contributions and any other deductions. It also carries starter and leaver information and each person's tax code and National Insurance details. You send an FPS every time you pay staff, and it must reach HMRC on or before payday.
The Employer Payment Summary (EPS) is the adjuster. It tells HMRC about things the FPS cannot, and about amounts that reduce what you actually owe. You file an EPS when any of the following apply:
- You are reclaiming statutory payments, such as recovery of statutory maternity, paternity, adoption or shared parental pay.
- You are claiming the Employment Allowance against your employer National Insurance.
- You paid no employees at all in a tax month or period, so there is no FPS to send.
- Your business has stopped employing people or has become dormant.
Get the two mixed up and your PAYE bill will not match what HMRC thinks you owe, which is one of the most common reasons employers end up in a needless back-and-forth with the tax office. We file the FPS every run and the EPS whenever the rules call for it, so your account reconciles.
When RTI submissions are due
The golden rule of RTI is short: the FPS must reach HMRC on or before payday. Not the week after, not by the payroll deadline you set internally, but on or before the actual date the money is available to your employee. There are a small number of easements, for example where paying on time genuinely is not practical, but they are the exception, and relying on them is not a strategy. Treat "on or before payday" as the rule that governs every run.
The EPS and the payment of the PAYE itself run on the tax-month calendar, which runs from the 6th of one month to the 5th of the next. Here is how the key dates fit together:
| Submission or payment | What it covers | When it is due |
|---|---|---|
| FPS | Pay and deductions for the pay run | On or before payday, every run |
| EPS | Adjustments, allowances, nil pay months | By the 19th of the following tax month |
| PAYE payment (electronic) | The tax and NIC you have reported | By the 22nd of the following tax month |
| PAYE payment (by post) | The tax and NIC you have reported | By the 19th of the following tax month |
| Final submission & P60s | Year-end reporting for the tax year | Final FPS or EPS by 19 April; P60s to staff by 31 May |
The awkward part is that these dates repeat relentlessly, and they do not move for your holidays, your busy season or a member of staff being off. Miss one FPS and you have missed a deadline, even if every other run that year was perfect. That is precisely why we build the filing into the pay run itself, so the deadline is met as a matter of routine rather than something anyone has to remember.
What happens if you file late
HMRC does not treat late RTI as a minor slip. It operates a system of automatic monthly late-filing penalties, and the amount you are charged is banded by the number of employees you have. The more people on your payroll, the more a late or missing FPS costs you. You are generally allowed one late filing in a tax year without a penalty, and after that the penalties apply per tax month in which a submission was late or missing. The bands work like this:
| Number of employees | Monthly late-filing penalty band |
|---|---|
| 1 to 9 | Lowest band |
| 10 to 49 | Higher band |
| 50 to 249 | Higher still |
| 250 or more | Highest band |
The exact pounds-and-pence figures for each band are set by HMRC and reviewed over time, so we do not quote a fixed sum here, but the principle is fixed and important: penalties rise as your workforce grows, and they accrue for every tax month you are late, not just once. On top of the filing penalties, if you also pay your PAYE late, HMRC charges interest on the overdue amount, and persistent late payment can attract further late-payment penalties of its own. There can also be a penalty where a submission is inaccurate rather than merely late.
The cheapest RTI is on-time RTI. Every one of these charges is avoidable by filing the FPS on or before payday and paying PAYE by the due date. We build both into the routine of every pay run, so the deadlines are met without you having to think about them.
Common RTI mistakes employers make
Most RTI penalties do not come from anyone being careless. They come from a handful of recurring traps that catch busy employers who are running payroll alongside everything else. These are the ones we see most often:
- Filing after payday. Paying staff first and filing the FPS a day or two later feels harmless, but it is a late submission in HMRC's eyes.
- Forgetting the nil-payment EPS. If you pay nobody in a period and file nothing at all, HMRC does not know why, and expects an EPS to say so.
- Wrong or mismatched employee details. A misspelt name, a wrong date of birth or an incorrect National Insurance number stops HMRC from matching the record and creates duplicate employments.
- Getting starters and leavers wrong. Not reporting a leaver, or reporting a starter without the right starter declaration, throws out an employee's tax code and their tax.
- Using an out-of-date tax code. Ignoring the tax code notices HMRC issues means people are taxed on the wrong basis, which surfaces later as an unwelcome bill.
- Duplicate payroll IDs. Changing an employee's payroll reference mid-year without telling HMRC correctly creates a second, phantom employment.
- Leaving corrections until year end. An error corrected promptly is simple; the same error left to build up for months is a much bigger unpick.
Because we run the payroll and the filing together, most of these simply cannot happen. The figures that go to HMRC are the figures we calculated, employee details are checked when people are set up, and corrections are dealt with in the run they arise rather than saved up.
How we file on time, every run
Our approach to RTI is deliberately unglamorous, because reliability is the whole point. When we process your pay run, the FPS is prepared automatically from the same figures we have just calculated, so there is nothing to re-key and nothing to forget. We file it with HMRC throughrecognised payroll software on or before your payday, every run, and we file the EPS whenever the rules call for one. After each filing we confirm your PAYE liability for the period, so you always know what has gone to HMRC and what you owe.
We also act as your HMRC agent. That means we register with HMRC to deal with your PAYE scheme on your behalf, so the submissions come from us and much of the correspondence comes to us too. Tax code notices, generic notifications and queries land where the expertise is, rather than in a pile on your desk. When something needs a conversation with HMRC, we are the ones who have it.
This is not a new service we are learning. We are a South Wales payroll bureau with 60+ years of combined experience, and many of our clients have been with us since 2006. We carried businesses through the introduction of RTI itself, and through auto-enrolment and the upheaval of furlough, without a missed beat. We are CIPP members,ICAEW-affiliated, and ICO-registered with GDPR-compliant handling of your employees' data, so both your compliance and their information are in accredited hands.
Year-end reporting and P60s
RTI runs through the year and closes it too. At the end of each tax year, on 5 April, your final submission for the year has to tell HMRC that it is the last one, and any final adjustments have to be reported. We make sure your final FPS or EPS is filed by the deadline, with the year-end indicators set correctly, so the year is closed off cleanly rather than left open to generate queries.
Once the year is closed, every employee who was working for you on the last day of the tax year is entitled to a P60, the summary of their total pay and deductions for the year. We produce the P60s and get them ready so each of your people has theirs by the 31 Maydeadline. Employees rely on P60s for mortgage applications, tax return claims, tax credit renewals and checking their own tax is right, so getting them out accurately and on time matters more than it might look.
Because we have filed correctly all year, year end is a formality with us rather than a scramble. There is no last-minute reconciliation of figures that should have been reported months ago, because they were reported in the runs they belonged to. If you want your RTI, your PAYE and your year end to simply be handled, from the first pay run to the final P60, talk to us about your payroll or see how our pricing works.