The 1115L tax code means HMRC has told your employer or pension provider to give you a tax-free Personal Allowance of £11,150 for the year, with the standard type of allowance (that’s what the L signals).1GOV.UK. Tax Codes – What Your Tax Code Means That figure sits £1,420 below the standard Personal Allowance of £12,570, so if you’re seeing 1115L on your payslip, your allowance has been reduced. The usual reasons are a taxable benefit from your employer or an underpayment of tax from an earlier year being clawed back through your code.
How to Read the Code
Every PAYE tax code has a number and a letter. Multiply the number by ten to get your tax-free allowance in pounds, and read the letter to see which type of allowance applies. HMRC issues codes directly to employers and pension providers so the right Income Tax is deducted before you’re paid.2GOV.UK. Tax Codes
For 1115L, 1115 × 10 = £11,150. The L means you get the standard type of Personal Allowance with no unusual calculations, no Marriage Allowance transfer, and no manual HMRC review.3HM Revenue & Customs. PAYE Manual – Coding: Codes: How They Are Used and Calculated: Suffix Codes: The Suffix
One point trips people up: the L doesn’t mean you’re on the standard allowance amount. It means you’re getting the standard type. The amount itself, the 1115 part, can be lower than the default 1257 if HMRC has made deductions against your allowance.
Why Your Allowance Is £1,420 Below the Standard
The standard Personal Allowance for the 2026/27 tax year is £12,570, which produces the default code of 1257L.4House of Commons Library. Direct Taxes: Rates and Allowances A code of 1115L means HMRC has knocked £1,420 off that. Three things typically cause this.
A Taxable Benefit From Your Employer
The most common reason is a benefit in kind, meaning something valuable your employer gives you on top of your salary. HMRC estimates the taxable value of the benefit and subtracts it from your Personal Allowance, which lowers the number in your code.1GOV.UK. Tax Codes – What Your Tax Code Means Common examples are company cars, private medical insurance, fuel cards, and company vans.5GOV.UK. Payrolling: Tax Employees Benefits and Expenses Through Your Payroll A £1,420 reduction is consistent with a modest benefit such as private health cover or a low-emission company car.
Not every employer works this way. Some use payrolling, where the benefit’s taxable value is added to your monthly pay and taxed through normal payroll. If your employer does that, your code stays at 1257L because the adjustment happens in your gross pay rather than your allowance. Either method should produce the same total tax across the year.
Underpaid Tax From an Earlier Year
If you underpaid tax in a previous year by less than £3,000, HMRC can collect the shortfall by reducing your tax code the following year rather than sending you a bill.6GOV.UK. Pay Your Self Assessment Tax Bill – Through Your Tax Code The underpayment is spread across twelve months of PAYE deductions. Larger amounts generally can’t be collected this way and HMRC will ask you to pay directly.
Income Just Above £100,000
For higher earners, the Personal Allowance starts to shrink once adjusted net income passes £100,000. It’s withdrawn at £1 for every £2 above that threshold and disappears entirely at £125,140.7GOV.UK. Personal Allowances: Adjusted Net Income A code of 1115L would correspond to adjusted net income of roughly £102,840, just above the taper threshold. If you’re in that earning range, the reduction is working as intended.
What 1115L Costs You Each Month
Your employer spreads the £11,150 allowance evenly across the year, giving you about £929.17 of tax-free income per month. Anything above that is taxed at the applicable rate: 20% for the basic rate band, which runs up to taxable income of £50,270.8GOV.UK. Income Tax Rates and Personal Allowances
Compared with someone on 1257L, you’re paying tax on an extra £1,420 of income per year. At the basic rate that’s about £284 more annually, or roughly £24 more each month. At the higher rate it climbs to about £568 a year. Worth checking, because if the reduction is wrong that’s real money leaving your account every payday.
PAYE runs on a cumulative basis, so your employer tracks your total earnings and tax paid since 6 April. A pay rise or bonus in one month is smoothed out across the year, and any over-deduction from earlier months corrects itself once the right code is in place.
Checking Whether 1115L Is Correct
Your most recent payslip shows the code your employer is currently using. Your P60 confirms the code applied for the tax year just ended, and a P45 records the code in use when you left a job.9GOV.UK. Your P45, P60 and P11D Form
If you don’t know why you’re on 1115L, start with employer benefits. A P11D, usually issued by July after the tax year ends, lists company benefits and their taxable values. Compare the total benefit figure against the £1,420 gap between your code and 1257L. If they roughly match, the code is probably right. If they don’t, or you’ve never had a P11D, something is worth questioning.
The fastest way to see how your code was built is HMRC’s “Check your Income Tax” online service, which shows which allowances you’re getting, which deductions have been applied, and where each adjustment comes from.10GOV.UK. Tax Codes – If You Think Your Tax Code Is Wrong It’s often where you’ll spot a benefit being double-counted or an old underpayment that’s already been cleared but is still being collected.
Fixing an Incorrect Code
If the online service shows something out of date, such as a benefit you no longer receive or an underpayment that’s already been settled, you can update the details through the same portal. It lets you correct employment, pension, income, and benefit information in one place.11GOV.UK. Income Tax: Enquiries If the online route doesn’t work for you, the Income Tax helpline handles code queries by phone.
Once HMRC processes the change, they send your employer a coding notice (sometimes called a P6) telling payroll to apply the new code.12GOV.UK. Understanding Your Employees Tax Codes – Changes During the Tax Year Employers must update the record before the next payment. Whether that shows up on your very next payslip depends on when the notification lands in the pay cycle. Because PAYE is cumulative, any tax over-deducted earlier in the year corrects itself automatically once the new code takes effect.
Reclaiming Overpaid Tax
If you’ve been on the wrong code and paid too much, you don’t have to wait until the tax year ends. Fixing your code mid-year means the cumulative PAYE calculation folds the overpayment in, and your next few payslips should show a larger-than-usual net figure while the system catches up.
For overpayments from earlier years, you can claim back up to four years from the end of the tax year in which the overpayment happened. As of 2026, the oldest year you can still reclaim is 2022/23, with a deadline of 5 April 2027. Once a year falls outside the four-year window, HMRC generally won’t process a refund claim for it. If you suspect 1115L has been wrong for several years, checking sooner protects the oldest ones from expiring.
One boundary worth flagging: if your code carries a prefix (S for Scotland, C for Wales) or a W1, M1, or X suffix, it isn’t a plain 1115L. The Scottish and Welsh prefixes apply devolved tax rates on top of the same allowance amount, and the W1/M1/X suffixes mean the code is being applied on an emergency, non-cumulative basis.13GOV.UK. Emergency Tax Codes If any of those appear alongside 1115L on your payslip, the checking and correction steps above still apply, but the tax being deducted may be calculated differently than a straight 1115L would produce.