HMRC Employment History: How to Get Your Work Record

There are four, and they are in order of how much work they cost you. Almost everyone should be using one of the first two.

1. The last five years, for any reason at all. The personal tax account or the HMRC app, above. Free and immediate.
2. Any year, if you are making a compensation claim. HMRC publishes a paper form for exactly this. GOV.UK: “You can also fill in the application form for a record from any year and send it to HMRC.” The form itself is published as “Use this form to get confirmation of your employment history to make a claim for compensation” — industrial injury, personal injury, medical negligence or another cause. It asks which claim you are making and which years you need. Free, but slow: GOV.UK tells you to chase the National Insurance helpline “if you have not heard from HMRC after 40 days”.
3. Any year, when you are not making a claim. This is the gap. The self-service stops at five years and the paper form is published for claimants, so a reader who needs eight years for a mortgage, a visa or a tribunal has no free route left. A subject access request to HMRC does reach it — see below.
4. What the employer wrote, rather than what it paid. Your personnel file, appraisals, notes of meetings, the reasons behind a decision, references it sent out about you. HMRC has none of that and never did. That is a request to the employer, and asking an employer for your HR file covers it properly.

Someone who has died. GOV.UK: “You can apply to get the employment history of someone who’s died if you’re legally entitled to claim damages on behalf of their estate.” There is a separate form for it. That is a narrower entitlement than being next of kin, and it is not a subject access request — the right of access belongs to living people. The same split is explained on getting medical records.

This is the part almost everyone has backwards, and it changes who you should write to.

An employer’s legal duty to keep payroll records is short. GOV.UK tells employers that “you need to keep them for 3 years from the end of the tax year they relate to”. Three years — covering what they paid you, the deductions, the reports they made to HMRC, tax code notices, leave and sickness absence.

HMRC’s own default is twice that. Its records management policy says “the default standard retention period for HMRC records is 6 years plus current, otherwise known as 6 years + 1”, and adds that “some records are required to be retained by law, for longer or shorter retention periods”. The National Insurance account is plainly one of the longer ones, because the compensation-claim form above offers a record from any year.

So the order to try is not the obvious one. If you want an old job confirmed and nothing more, go to HMRC first. Write to a former employer when you want something only it ever had — the file, the notes, the reasons — and accept that beyond three years it is keeping those by choice rather than by duty.

None of this stops an employer holding records for longer, and many do, because employment claims and pension liabilities outlast the tax rule. It only means you cannot rely on it.

A large share of people looking for their work history are really looking for one document, and the rules on it are specific.

GOV.UK is short about it: “If you’re working for an employer on 5 April they must give you a P60”, and “they must provide this by 31 May, on paper or electronically”. Lost it? “If you’ve lost your P60, ask your employer for a replacement.”

The bit that catches people out is what happens when the employer cannot or will not. HMRC does not issue P60s and cannot produce a replacement one. What GOV.UK offers instead is to “ask for the information that would be on the P60” — the figures, not the form. For most purposes that is accepted, and where it is not, the thing to check is whether whoever asked you for “a P60” actually needs proof of pay and tax, which they usually do.

The same is true of a payslip. Nobody else holds a copy of it. If the employer still exists it is worth asking, and a request for your personnel file will usually pick up payroll records with it.

People are often told to get a “statement of earnings” and arrive here looking for one. It is a real HMRC form, and it answers a different question.

Form L17 is “a statement of your earnings, including overtime, bonus or commission, for the last 3 months”. GOV.UK is explicit about who completes it: “Your employer must fill in this form”, and “All earnings set out must be gross, ie before tax”.

So it is three months, not years; it comes from the employer, not from HMRC; and it proves what you earn now rather than who you have worked for. If someone has asked you for one, an employment history will not do instead — and if what you actually need is the list of employers, the routes above are the right ones and L17 is not.

Three situations, and outside them the free routes above are better.

• You need more than five years and you are not making a claim. A request to HMRC reaches what it still holds about you, without having to say why you want it or fit a claim category. Making an HMRC subject access request has the route, the address and what to ask for.
• You want the employer’s file, not the figures. Notes, emails about you, the investigation, the reason a decision went the way it did. The employer guide is the page for that, and Acas is separate again if a conciliation file is what you are after.
• Benefits, not wages. Periods on Jobseeker’s Allowance, Universal Credit or Employment and Support Allowance sit with the DWP rather than with HMRC. The DWP page covers what it holds and what it already gives you free.

How long they have. An organisation must respond without undue delay and within one month. It may extend by up to two further months where the request is complex or you have made a number of requests, but it must tell you within the first month that it is doing so, and why.

What it costs. There is normally no fee. A reasonable fee may only be charged where a request is manifestly unfounded or excessive, or where you ask for further copies.

The free letter builder writes the request for you and puts the right wording in it. You do not need it — a plain email saying what you want and who you are is a valid request — but the common failure on this subject is being vague about the years, and the builder asks.

The single most useful thing you can do on this subject is name the period. HMRC’s own compensation form asks for a start year and an end year for the same reason.

What a search has to cover. An organisation has to carry out a reasonable and proportionate search — not an exhaustive one. What counts as reasonable depends on the volume of information, the difficulty of locating it, and the size and resources of the organisation. This is a common reason for a partial response, and it is worth being specific about what you want.

So “my employment history from April 1998 to April 2007” is a better request than “all my employment records”, and it is much harder to answer badly. If you do not know the years, give the employers you can remember and say the record is to fill in the gaps between them.

Proving who you are. An organisation may ask you to verify your identity, but only where it has reasonable doubts about who you are, and it should ask for the minimum needed. Where it needs further information to deal with your request, the one-month clock pauses until you provide it.

Your National Insurance number is the key to all of this. If you have lost it, the personal tax account and the HMRC app will both find it for you, and that is quicker than any letter.

• A reference. No employer is obliged to give one, and a request for your own data does not create the obligation. What it can get you is a copy of a reference an employer already sent about you, which is a different and often more useful thing.
• Proof of your right to work. That is a share code or a document check, not an employment record, and an employment history will not satisfy an employer asking for one.
• Someone else’s work history. The right of access reaches your own personal data and nothing else. The one exception is the deceased-person route above, and that is an entitlement of the estate rather than a right of access.

The two common outcomes are silence and a record with a hole in it. They need different responses.

A missing year in an HMRC record usually means an employer did not report it, and no amount of chasing HMRC will conjure it up. That is the point to write to the employer, or to whoever bought it, and to look for the paperwork you may still have — a payslip, a P45, a contract, a bank statement showing the salary going in. Old bank statements are the most commonly overlooked evidence of a job, and they survive employers.

Complaining. Complain to the organisation first. Since 19 June 2026 every organisation has had a legal duty to give you a clear way to raise a data protection complaint, to acknowledge it within 30 days, to look into it properly and to tell you the outcome. If it does not, or the answer is incomplete, you can then complain to the Information Commissioner's Office.

Check what you got back helps if a response has arrived and looks thinner than it should.