The 60-day clock on that HMRC letter

HMRC is issuing 1.8m Simple Assessment letters. Directors who take dividends are prime candidates. Everyone will report the deadline to pay (31 Jan). The useful fact is the deadline to disagree: 60 days, and it is the one that closes first.

HMRC is sending out around 1.8 million Simple Assessment letters this summer. Working-age taxpayers started receiving them on 30 June. Pensioners get theirs from 12 August.

If you take dividends from your own company, or you hold savings outside an ISA, you are a likely candidate.

A Simple Assessment (the letter is a PA302) is HMRC telling you what it thinks you owe on income that was not taxed through PAYE or picked up by Self Assessment. Savings interest. Dividends. A second income. Pension income. Usually it appears when the amount is too large to claw back through your tax code.

Here is the part worth knowing.

The letter gives you a date to pay: 31 January 2027 for most people. If your letter is dated on or after 31 October 2026, it is three months from the date of the letter instead.

But you only get 60 days to tell HMRC it is wrong.

Those are two different clocks, and the short one is not the one printed in bold. It is entirely possible to open the letter in August, decide to deal with it before January, and discover you have quietly lost the right to argue.

And these letters can be wrong. A Simple Assessment is not a return you filed. It is HMRC assembling a figure from information other people sent them — your bank, your pension provider, your company's filings. The arithmetic will be right. The inputs are not always.

The things we'd check first:

• Dividends. Does the figure match what you actually voted and minuted? Not what left the business account.
• Savings interest. Joint accounts get misallocated. So do accounts you closed.
• Employment income. If you changed roles, or ran two payrolls in one year, check the total.
• Allowances. Personal allowance, dividend allowance, the starting rate for savings.

If it looks wrong, contact HMRC inside the 60 days. If it looks right, pay it and move on — there is nothing to be gained by sitting on it.

The worst outcome is not owing the money. It is owing money you did not actually owe, because the window to say so closed while the letter sat on the kitchen table.

If you are not sure whether the numbers are right, that is exactly the sort of thing to put in front of whoever handles your tax. Do it in August, not in January.

General information, not tax advice. Check your own position with whoever handles your tax before acting on it.