Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what estimate he has made of the number of directors of small companies, who file their PAYE RTI returns annually.

PAYE schemes that pay their employees annually all in the same tax month may register as an ‘annual scheme’. Further information can be found on gov.uk at the following link (see section: Annual payroll scheme for PAYE): https://www.gov.uk/running-payroll/changing-paydays.

Information on which PAYE schemes are operated by small companies and which are operated by other types of employer such as sole traders and partnerships is not readily available for all PAYE schemes.

Among all PAYE schemes, not just those that are operated by small companies, the number of registered PAYE schemes that were live on 8 October 2020 (the date this information was extracted) and were registered as an ‘annual scheme’ was 33,300.