If your business provided employees with benefits in kind during the 2025/26 tax year — a company car, private medical insurance, a gym membership, an interest-free loan, or anything similar not already payrolled — the deadline to report it to HMRC is 6 July 2026. That’s two days away. The associated employer’s Class 1A National Insurance contributions, currently set at 15% of the total benefit value, are then due by 19 July if paying by post, or 22 July if paying electronically.
This deadline catches out small businesses every year, often not because owners don’t know it exists, but because benefits in kind get treated as an afterthought — something the accountant “will sort out” — right up until they don’t.
What actually needs reporting
A P11D is required for any employee or director who received taxable benefits or expenses that weren’t already run through payroll during the year. Common examples that trip businesses up: company vehicles (including vans used for any private mileage), private health or dental cover, subsidised or interest-free loans over £10,000, and non-business travel or entertainment costs paid on the company’s behalf. If you’re already payrolling benefits in real time, some of this is handled differently — but any benefit that wasn’t formally registered for payrolling before the tax year started still needs a P11D.
Alongside each individual P11D, employers must also submit a P11D(b), which tells HMRC the total Class 1A National Insurance owed across all the benefits provided. Missing this isn’t a quiet paperwork slip — penalties are automatic, calculated at £100 per 50 employees for each month the P11D(b) is late, with interest and escalating penalties applied to any Class 1A NIC paid late as well.
Why this trips up smaller businesses specifically
Larger companies typically have payroll teams tracking benefits in kind as they’re granted throughout the year. Smaller businesses more often discover, in early July, that nobody kept a running log of who got what — meaning someone now has to reconstruct a year’s worth of company car changes, healthcare enrolments, and expense arrangements from scratch, under time pressure, right before the deadline.
If that sounds familiar, the fix isn’t complicated, it’s just usually applied a year too late: register benefits for payrolling before the start of the next tax year (registration for 2026/27 payrolling needs to happen before 6 April 2027 to avoid needing P11Ds at all next time), and keep a simple running record of who receives what, updated as it happens rather than reconstructed annually.
What to do in the next 48 hours
Confirm with your payroll provider or accountant that P11D and P11D(b) submissions are actually in progress, not just “on the list.” A one-line email today is cheaper than a penalty next month.
Check whether any benefits were missed from last year’s list — new company vehicles, changes in health cover, or loans that crossed the £10,000 threshold partway through the year are the most commonly forgotten items.
Diarise the 19/22 July Class 1A NIC payment date separately from the 6 July filing deadline — these are two different deadlines with two different penalty regimes, and treating them as one is a common and avoidable mistake.
Decide now whether to payroll benefits for next year. Registering benefits for real-time payrolling removes the need for a P11D altogether for those items, spreading the tax through the year instead of reporting it retrospectively. The window to register for 2026/27 doesn’t open until later in the year, but deciding now — while this year’s scramble is still fresh — makes it far more likely you’ll actually follow through when the window opens, rather than defaulting back into the same annual fire drill.
The takeaway
The P11D deadline isn’t new and isn’t unusual — but it arrives at short notice every single year for businesses that don’t track benefits in kind as they happen. If you haven’t confirmed this with whoever runs your payroll, do it today rather than after the 6 July cutoff has passed.
