Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, how many outstanding income tax rebate claims does HM Revenue and Customs have; and how many of these claims have been outstanding for more than (a) one month, (b) three months, (c) six months and (d) 12 months.

HMRC recognise that repayments are important for customers. They prioritise them and work hard to ensure they are processed as quickly and securely as possible.

HMRC balance the provision of prompt payments to eligible customers with effective revenue protection from fraudsters.

They continue to invest in automation and to review their internal processes to ensure repayments are issued as quickly as possible.

HMRC also understands the importance of keeping the customer, and where appropriate the customer’s representative informed of progress, and are exploring ways of doing that more effectively.

In the meantime, HMRC’s online ‘Where’s My Reply’ tool can help customers understand when they can expect to receive a response.

HMRC does not produce one overall average processing time across all Income Tax repayment routes, because timings differ depending on the repayment type and checks required.

HMRC does not hold a single consolidated measure of outstanding Income Tax repayment claims across all channels, and producing a comprehensive breakdown by the age bands requested would require manual collation from multiple systems. Gathering this data would exceed the cost threshold for answering parliamentary questions.

The majority of Income tax repayment claims are for PAYE and Self Assessment (SA) customers. There are several triggers for PAYE and SA repayments, but for those which involve the customer submitting a claim, these are treated as priority post. HMRC have an agreed and published service standard to clear 80% of priority post within 15 working days of receipt. HMRC’s correspondence performance has improved from 68.2% in April 2025 to 87.8% in November 2025. They publish regular updates on their performance at: www.gov.uk/government/collections/hmrc-quarterly-performance-updates