In the previous UK financial year (2024–25), I earnt the princely sum of £9,451 in UK-taxable income (due, in no small part, to moving abroad in the summer). I anticipated a tax bill below £1,000, but through a litany of errors (one on my side, many many others on HMRC & SLC’s sides) I have ended up having to pay £8,345.80. I have since managed to claim back £5,763.60, but HMRC continue to erroneously hold at least £1,366 that I am still owed. However, the paper trail is now so messy and convoluted that it will not be possible to resolve this over the phone (though I have tried.)

Here is the short version:

• I have spent over seven months trying to resolve this issue, including several hours stuck on the phone with your support teams
• I am still owed at least £1,366, due to an error on your part in recalculating my tax bill
• I demand the repayment I am owed and compensation for the time, effort and financial uncertainty that this has caused me

On an unrelated note, one of your letters directed me to a link that has been squatted by a dodgy payday loans company; see my full exploration of this error here. You should ensure that this link is no longer provided in correspondence about student loan repayments.

What follows is a chronological account of how we reached this point:

Summer 2025: Initial Tax Return ¶

For a full, detailed breakdown of my tax residency and income in the 2024–25 tax year, see the ‘Additional Notes’ that I attached to my amended tax return.

I quote:

During the 24/25 UK finanacial[sic] year (UK24/25), I alternated between the UK and France.

…

I moved to France properly (i.e., received visa and signed long-term rental contract) on 2024-07-12, but I am not eligible for split-year treatment due to the amount of time I spent in the UK. Thus, I am resident of both the UK and France from 2024-07-12 until 2025-04-06.

Per the Dual Taxation Agreement (DTA), I claim UK tax residence for UK24/25 on the grounds of nationality (art. 4, 2(c)) as the preceding tests are inconclusive.

I believe, however, I was a Schumacher non-resident in France.

I sent off my 2024 French return in May 2025, and then my 2024–25 UK return in June, along with requests to both countries’ tax authorities for proof of residency.

As I made clear to HMRC, most of my figures would be provisional until later that year, and the final quarter would remain provisional until late in 2025; also, I highlighted that my lingering UK tax residency in 2024–25 was a fluke and would not be the case in the following year.

October 2025: Amending My Return ¶

At the start of October, I received my French tax statement for 2024: nothing more to pay (as expected, since all my pay had been taxed at source). Later in the month, I received my UK tax statement: £6,840.10 due by January 31^st 2025, with an additional £1,505.70 due by the end of the following July.

I investigated my two tax returns and realised that I had overstated my taxable foreign income on the UK return by about £7,000 (because I had just used the gross income figure), and I understated my foreign tax already paid by about £2,500 (because France has six different types of deduction that all count as income tax under the DTA).

I had already told HMRC the figures were provisional, so presumed that I would be at the front of the queue for processing updates when I finally received my real numbers. I expected that I’d send in an amended return and that it’d all get sorted before the end of January, and so I posted the amended return (recorded delivery, of course) at the end of November 2025, during another visit back to the UK, and didn’t think much more about it.

For good measure, I included another reminder that in the 2025–26 UK tax year, I would be fully France-resident.

January 2026: Paying My Bill ¶

In the new year, I remembered about the looming end-of-January payment deadline and realised I hadn’t heard anything back from HMRC yet, so I called them. After an interminable slog through the automated chatbot and endless pre-recorded messages, the agent confirmed that they had received the amended return, but that it was not due to be processed until November 2026. She clearly had my amended return up on her computer screen as she referred to figures in it, so HMRC had my updated return, and it knew it had my updated return, but it wouldn’t officially know that it knew for the best part of a year, by which point it would have robbed me of the best part of ten grand that both it, and I, knew it would end up giving back to me anyway.

Fortunately, I was able to gather the money required to pay off the absurd bill before the dealine and avoid incurring and penalties (again, for payments that we both knew would be reversed).

Student Loan Repayments ¶

I decided to take a closer look at the tax calculation to try and figure out how the bill—even accounting for my erroneous figures—had ended up so sizeable. At which point, something jumped out at me:

Photo by the author

Even with my wrong figures, I was only due to pay a few grand of tax. So why was I now looking at paying well over twice that? Well, just below the above calculation, was this one:

Photo by the author

But wait: I had dutifully informed the SLC when I moved abroad, and had set up a Direct Debit to make my monthly repayments. So why were they now double-charging me?

After some digging, I found this small note buried in one of the SLC’s help pages (emphasis mine):

Overseas Direct Debit payments ¶

If you have been paying Direct Debit payments to the SLC while you have been abroad your tax return will need to include your total income.

Your student loan repayments will be calculated on this total income, but will not take into account the Direct Debit payments you have already made to the SLC.

After you send your tax return, contact the Student Loan Company and they will tell HMRC how much you have paid.

HMRC then uses this figure to reduce the amount of tax you owe.

So despite two organs of the same government, and despite information normally flowing bidirectionally and automatically between the two bodies when working in the UK, in this one specific case I have to (for some, unstated reason) contact the SLC to tell them to tell HMRC that I’ve been paying my loan off.

I called SLC. Another phone maze. More waiting to the sound of classicial music through tinny mobile phone speakers. Another friendly enough support agent, forced to bear the brunt of my wholly justified frustration. She said she had passed on my request to the backoffice team, and it would be processed in five working days.

Predicted 2025–26 Income Tax ¶

But this still leaves a £3,000-ish difference between the numbers I was being asked to pay, and the Income Tax and student loan deductions that had been calculated. For this final piece of the puzzle, I had to dig a bit into the letter, where I found this:

Photo by the author

So despite me having repeatedly told HMRC that this year was a one-off, and that I would be fully tax-resident in France next time with no tax obligations in the UK, HMRC just ignored this and applied the same Income Tax figure from this year to the next. I prompty submitted a separate claim to nullify the predicted 2025–26 payments.

Summary ¶

So, to summarise, I started 2026 with three separate claims in progress to try and fix my bill:

• amending my tax return for 2024–25 UK tax year, where I had overstated my foreign-earned income and understated my foreign-paid tax
  • Goal: reduce my 2024–25 Income Tax due after tax reductions from £3,011.40 to whatever is reasonable for my UK income of £9,451 (roughly £400)
• demanding that the SLC tell HMRC that I’ve double-paid for my loan repayments
  • Goal: reduce my 2024–25 student loan repayments due from £2,323 to whatever is reasonable for my income of £9,451 (roughly £750)
• telling HMRC that I will owe them nothing in the 2025–26 UK tax year 2025–26 (or, I hope, ever after)
  • Goal: reduce my predicted 2025–26 Income Tax due from £3,011.40 to £0

…for a total paid of £8,345.80, which I aim to reduce to roughly £1,100.

April 2026 ¶

Repayment for predicted 2025-26 tax ¶

I checked on my HMRC account and saw that I had a tax credit to claim. That netted me £3,020.82 back; but what was it for? Based on the number I guessed it must be either the predicted 2025–26 payments or the miscalculated 2024–25 payments, plus a little bit of interest in either case.

Recognition of already-paid student loan repayments ¶

I called SLC to chase up the student loan repayments and the agent said that, as SLC had told HMRC what they needed to, I should contact HMRC instead.

I called HMRC and asked the agent to clarify which of the three corrections the HMRC repayment I had received was for and she said it was my 2024–25 tax return amendment (which I had previously been told wasn’t scheduled to be processed until November 2026). When I asked whether they had received the student loan repayment information from the SLC, she passed me on to the HMRC Student Loans team, who told me to contact SLC. I reiterated they had sent me here, so she put me on hold whilst she called them; however, I think she pressed the wrong button as I was instead transferred to a rather confused man called Steven who promptly hung up on me.

I called back, got reconnected to the same agent and was told that SLC had passed on the information incorrectly when I had asked them before and that they in fact need to send me a letter to sign, granting them the authority to send an email to HMRC; absurd bureaucracy. She also clarified that the credit I had recevied was actually for my predicted 2025–26 tax return, and that my amended previous year return was still in the queue to process.

I called SLC again and explained the error to them. The agent initially denied that they had done anything incorrectly and I spent a while on hold whilst she spoke to the finance department; upon her eventual return, she conceded that they had in fact messed up and that they would send me an email to request my permission to contact HMRC, which would arrive within five days.

In total, I wasted just over an hour and half on all of this, largely spent listening to tinny hold music or navigating (and re-navigating) inpenetrable phone mazes.

Four days later, I received the email from SLC, and I replied granting them permission to tell HMRC I had already made all of my student loan repayments from overseas.

Two days later, I received a letter from HMRC. First, they confirmed that the SLC had told them I had made repayments of £1,488 already, which they have credited to my tax account (though nothing ever appeared visibly in my account). But, given that they had originally charged me £2,323, that leaves £835 overpaid.

Remarkably, they also tried to send me to a dodgy payday loan company, but that’s a story for another day.

May 2026: Repayment for overpaid student loans ¶

I claimed another tax credit, this time for £1,498.99; the credit for my already-paid student loan repayments, plus a little bit of early payment interest.

June 2026: 2024–25 recalculation ¶

I received, unannounced on June 16, an HMRC payment for £1,277.25 direct to my bank account. That number didn’t match up to any that I was still expecting, and in my HMRC personal space I could see only that it was somehow related to my January payment.

Then, on June 23, I received a letter from HMRC (dated June 12) informing me that they have now processed my amended tax return for the 2024–25 tax year. In the new calculation there is no mention of any predicted payments for the 2025–26 tax year (good!), and the Income Tax due after tax reductions is reduced from from £3,011.40 to £381.20 (which is fair enough!). But then, somehow, they managed to re-include my student loan repayments, now totalling £2,201:

Photo by the author

In explaining the random repayment of £1,277.25 (or £1,264.20 without the interest), the closest I was able to get was by calculating as follows:

But this still leaves £2,548.74 still in play (which is close enough to the £2,582.20 total stated on my amended tax calculation that I assume this is now the only number I need to care about), and I have no idea why the partial credit for my student loan repayments seems to have worked against me in terms of reimbursement. But it seems that everything now seems to hinge entirely on these over- and double-paid student loan repayments.

After an hour on the phone to HMRC (and being transferred between three different departments) I ended up with an agent in the Student Loans department who was unable to comprehend my issue or what I was calling for. She showed me where to find my repayments in the HMRC portal and pointed out that I had received my £1,488 student loan credit on 6 May. I was in a hurry for an appointment and confused as to where the remaining unreimbursed money may have come from (given that my recalculated Income Tax bill was only £381.20), and it was clear that I was going to get nowhere over the phone, so I gave up.

I realised I needed a chart to visualise where the money had come from:

So, in sum and to the best of my deductive ability, HMRC were doing okay on reimbursing me right up until the long-delayed recalculation, where they seem to have correctly reduced my Income Tax due, but then expanded then amount of student loan repayments to maintain the existing balance, even through they had previously returned to me the bulk of this value. So now I have a historic repayment that was originally for my student loan balance (and which the HMRC Student Loans team still adamantly believes to be the case), but which has now been repurposed as a repayment for my overpaid 2024–25 tax (without then also re-accounting for the already-paid student loan repayments).

In short, HMRC have awarded themselves £1,366 out of thin air, but with a paper trail that obfuscates that they have done so.

What do I want to happen now? ¶

1. Fix my 2024–25 tax return and reimburse me the £1,366 or so that you have continued to overcharge me
2. Compensate me for the time, effort and financial uncertainty that you have caused me
3. Stop sending people to studentloanrepayment.co.uk, as the domain is no longer under the control of the SLC