Income Tax liabilities statistics: tax year 2016 to 2017 to tax year 2019 to 2020
These statistics are based on HMRC’s annual Survey of Personal Incomes, a representative sample survey of the tax records of individuals in HMRC’s PAYE, Self Assessment and repayment claims administrative systems.
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Individuals’ tax liabilities are estimated using the information the SPI provides on taxpayer incomes and circumstances (such as their age).
Liabilities are amounts of tax due on incomes arising in a given tax year, whereas receipts show amounts paid and collected in a given year. Due to lags in the payment of Income Tax particularly that collected via Self Assessment, and other reasons, statistics on Income Tax liabilities will not match those for receipts.
If you require statistics about how much tax is actually paid and collected by HMRC in any given tax year, or information on how the tax has been collected, please see our statistics on Income Tax receipts.
The nature of how Income Tax is collected means it is not possible to analyse Income Tax receipts by taxpayer characteristics, for example, by taxpayer’s marginal tax rate, age or gender. However, these analyses are possible through modelling of Income Tax liabilities based on a representative sample of taxpayers using administrative data.
If you require detailed breakdowns of income taxpayer numbers and the distribution of tax liabilities across taxpayers and tax bands, then you should look at statistics on tax liabilities.
HMRC also produce detailed statistics on taxpayer incomes.
The tables in this section provide breakdowns of the number of income taxpayers and Income Tax liabilities by age and gender, marginal tax rate, income source and tax band, and by country and Government Office Region.