Employed (PAYE) £900 Tax Bill !!! 4 week/24 year anomally

have a search for Week 53 Payments
one example here - https://moneysoft.co.uk/support/week-53-payments/

xylophone wrote: »

You don't dispute that the tax is owed?

If you do owe the tax, then you have in effect been given an interest free loan by HMRC which you will repay by instalments?

That said, it is a pity that payroll did not include a note to explain the system with the "week 53" payslip.

The OP seems to have been advised that the tax is owed due to the week 56 situation. If you were on the standard tax code of 1185L then you would have received about £988 extra tax allowance so if on 20% tax rate you would owe about £200 on 40% tax rate £400
As BoGoF advises this strongly suggests that something else is involved which could be checked if the OP provides the full details.
The vast majority of people affected by this week 53 54 56 will not owe anything near this amount.
Certainly agree that a note for employees affected by this would be very helpful and in fact something along these lines was suggested by HMRC at the time they started to do this on the scale that it is currently done.

Edit Completely missed the point that the 20% tax band has been exhausted by pay period 13 for someone paying tax at 40% This greatly increases the tax owed if you are a 40% tax payer. Excellent explanation by unholyangel in post #10

Someones bound to disagree with my phrasing but in the interests of trying to help you understand.....tax works on a system of apportioning. So your allowance is split based on how frequently you're paid. In your case, your personal allowance of 11950 (could be 11950-11959 but 950 is more likely imo with a lot of Flat Rate Expenses being £100) divided by 13 (how many pay periods would be in a normal year). But in that year you received 14 pays. So the last pay would be liable for tax wholly at 40% with no allowances and no basic rate (since they would have been fully used in the previous 13 weeks).

So your allowance was £920 (rounded up slightly for ease) every 4 weeks and basic rate band apportioned was 2654.

So you should have paid 40% on the £920 you paid 0% on. And you should have paid 40% on the £2654 you paid 20% on. Add those together and you will come within about £4 of what you have quoted, which can easily be explained again by the way its calculated.

Hope that helps.