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, £2,323 of which was due to student loan repayments. The root cause of this is a bizarre failure of communication between SLC and HMRC, but trying to fix it has taken a huge amount of work due to SLC errors.
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, £2,323 of which was due to student loan repayments. The root cause of this is a bizarre failure of communication between SLC and HMRC, but trying to fix it has taken a huge amount of work due to SLC errors.
Here is the short version:
I have spent over seven months trying to resolve this issue, including several hours stuck on the phone with SLC’s and HMRC’s support teams
The initial student loan repayments were unexpectedly high because SLC do not automatically inform HMRC about overseas repayments (for no reason that I can see)
Getting SLC to actually inform HMRC has taken months, firstly because SLC did so incorrectly and secondly because the process is absurdly bureaucratic
On another note, HMRC directed me to a URL formerly controlled by SLC that has since been squatted by a dodgy payday loans company; see my full exploration of this error here.
What follows is a chronological account of how we reached this point:
I moved to France in July 2024, but remained tax resident in the UK for the 2024–25 tax year. I sent off my 2024 French tax return in May 2025, and then my 2024–25 UK return in June.
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 31st 2025, with an additional £1,505.70 due by the end of the following July. I investigated my returns, identified errors I have made in my UK return and sent off an amendment to correct these.
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. I called them and found that processing my amendment would take place long after the payment deadline. 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).
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 SLC’s help pages (emphasis mine):
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. Even she initially had no idea about this requirement, but eventually she relented and said she had passed on my request for them to inform HMRC to the backoffice team, and it would be processed in five working days.
So, to summarise, I started 2026 with three separate claims in progress to try and fix my bill, one of which is relevant to SLC:
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)
April 2026: Recognition of already-paid student loan repayments
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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. 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.
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.
I called SLC again and explained the error made. 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.
Remarkably, HMRC also tried to send me to a dodgy payday loan company due to SLC’s failure to renew a domain (or to inform HMRC about the loss of control), but that’s a story for another day.
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.
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. They messed up once again, again by inflating my student loan repayments and seemingly disregarding the payments previously made:
Photo by the author
In the letter they said they would tell the SLC about my repayments, but nothing appears within the SLC portal to indicate any additional repayments over the mandatory minimum. Is this an error on HMRC’s part, or did they tell SLC, who failed to re-iterate to them that I had already paid £1,488 of those repayments?
Here is a chart to visualise how the vamount and delineation of my (mostly over)charged tax bill has fluctuated over time:
2024–25 UK tax year bill payment and reimbursement tracker
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. They either did not notify SLC of this, or they did and SLC took no action.
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).
