HMRC’s £471.5bn receipts line continues to raise the bar for PAYE and NIC compliance in 2026

PAYE and NIC Compliance is no longer a supplier-side payroll assumption. It now sits inside one of HMRC’s most important revenue protection priorities. HMRC’s latest tax and National Insurance contribution receipts show PAYE Income Tax and NIC receipts of £471.5 billion for April 2025 to March 2026, an increase of £48.5 billion on the comparable period a year earlier, according to HMRC’s monthly tax and NIC receipts bulletin.

That figure is not only a measure of tax collected. It is a marker of the scale of the employment tax system HMRC is protecting. PAYE and NICs sit behind employment, payroll, umbrella companies, agency labour and contingent workforce models. They are part of the money that funds public services, and HMRC’s stated purpose is to collect that money while helping compliant taxpayers get things right and making it harder for non-compliance to go unchecked.

This is where the issue moves from public finance into labour supply chain governance. The same PAYE and NIC money trail that HMRC is protecting now runs through increasingly complex contingent workforce arrangements. At the same time, April 2026 Joint and Several Liability means unpaid umbrella PAYE risk can move upstream to the organisations that use, place and benefit from that labour. OPRaaS becomes relevant because it gives end-hirers and recruitment agencies a way to evidence that PAYE and NIC Compliance is being monitored, challenged and controlled, rather than left to supplier confidence.

Why HMRC’s PAYE and NIC line now matters commercially

HMRC’s receipts bulletin records PAYE Income Tax and NIC receipts of £471.5 billion for April 2025 to March 2026, £48.5 billion higher than the same period a year earlier. Gross HMRC tax and NIC receipts reached £938.8 billion for the same tax year, up £80.2 billion year on year. HMRC attributes part of the movement to changes to Employer Class 1 NICs from April 2025 and earlier changes to Employee NICs from April 2024.

The wider compliance picture makes the point more sharply. In its 2024 to 2025 annual report, HMRC reported £48.0 billion of compliance yield, described as revenue collected and protected that would otherwise have been lost to the Exchequer without HMRC intervention. HMRC also reported that its compliance work returned £23 for every £1 spent on its compliance workforce.

The message is clear: HMRC does not view compliance as paperwork. It views compliance as revenue protection. PAYE and NICs are part of the tax base it is mandated to collect, and failures in that system matter because they reduce public revenue, distort competition and create unfair advantage for non-compliant operators.

For businesses using contingent labour, that matters because the revenue HMRC is protecting is often generated through arrangements that sit outside the organisation’s own payroll team. A worker may be supplied by an agency, paid through an umbrella company, managed through an MSP, and working day to day inside an end-client organisation. The commercial benefit is visible. The tax evidence is often less so.

Why umbrella company compliance is now part of the same story

The umbrella company market sits at the centre of this change. It supports large parts of the temporary and contractor labour market, but it also creates a practical separation between the organisation using the labour and the payroll operator responsible for deducting and remitting PAYE and NICs.

That separation is exactly what government and HMRC have been trying to address. The government’s response to tackling non-compliance in the umbrella company market explains that tax non-compliance can leave workers facing substantial tax bills, allow non-compliant umbrella companies to undercut compliant competitors, threaten responsible businesses and damage the functioning of the market.

That policy language is important because it shows that umbrella compliance is not being treated as a narrow payroll issue. It is being treated as a market integrity issue, a worker protection issue and a tax collection issue. PAYE and NIC Compliance therefore becomes the point where employment tax, supplier assurance and workforce governance meet.

The practical implication is simple. If an organisation relies on umbrella labour, it cannot safely treat the umbrella company as a black box. It needs to know whether PAYE and NICs are being operated correctly, whether warning signs are being reviewed, and whether evidence exists if HMRC, a client, regulator or audit committee asks for it later.

How Joint and Several Liability changes the standard of evidence

The Joint and Several Liability regime under Chapter 11 of Part 2 of the Income Tax (Earnings and Pensions) Act 2003 is the point at which the evidence requirement changes. GOV.UK’s policy note on PAYE changes for the umbrella company market explains that legislation will make employment agencies or end clients jointly and severally liable for amounts required to be accounted for under the PAYE provisions where an umbrella company forms part of a labour supply chain.

That does not only change who might be liable. It changes what good compliance looks like.

A preferred supplier list, a right-to-work check, an accreditation certificate or an onboarding questionnaire may all be useful. They show that some checks happened at a particular moment. What they do not necessarily show is whether the supply chain remained controlled while workers were being engaged, paid and supplied.

That is the gap Joint and Several Liability exposes. The question is no longer simply, “Did we approve this supplier?” It becomes, “Can we evidence what we checked, when we checked it, what changed, what we escalated and how we responded?”

This is the difference between onboarding and assurance. Onboarding records entry into the supply chain. Assurance records the condition of the supply chain while risk is being created.

Where PAYE and NIC Compliance evidence usually breaks down

In most contingent workforce models, the problem is not that nothing is being done. The problem is that the evidence is scattered.

Umbrella checks may sit in procurement folders. Worker identity documents may sit in supplier portals. Payslip samples may be requested only when there is a concern. RTI, bank, payslip, worker and contract data may be held by different parties. Audit notes may sit in email trails. Board reporting may focus on labour spend, headcount, margin or supplier performance, while PAYE and NIC risk remains in the background.

That model may be enough to keep the workforce moving. It is much weaker when a business is asked to show one dated evidence file explaining how its labour supply chain was controlled.

The weakness, therefore, is not always an absence of activity. It is an absence of continuity. If the organisation cannot show what was checked, who checked it, what was found, what changed and how exceptions were resolved, then its PAYE and NIC Compliance position is harder to defend.

That is why the evidence needs to move upstream with the liability. If the financial risk can reach the agency or end-hirer, the compliance record must be visible to them too.

What audit-ready PAYE and NIC Compliance looks like

Audit-ready PAYE and NIC Compliance is not a static folder of historic documents. It is a live evidence position that can be read, tested and produced when required.

Inside the OPRaaS LSCA Self-Certification Course, Module 11 maps Joint and Several Liability to LSCA controls. The thirteen JSL Readiness questions sit across four control families: Governance, Process and contracts, Data and analytics, and Worker-facing controls.

Those control families are designed to move PAYE and NIC Compliance away from periodic supplier reassurance and into a continuously evidenced assurance model. The output is the OPRaaS Defence File: a dated, time-stamped and evidence-led record that an end-hirer or recruitment agency can produce when HMRC, a public-sector client, regulator, procurement lead or audit committee asks how the labour supply chain was controlled.

The Data and analytics control family is where the HMRC receipts line becomes operational. RTI submissions, payslip samples, worker identity data, National Insurance numbers, bank details and umbrella pay-run evidence can be sampled, tested and escalated against known risk indicators. Exceptions can be identified and recorded, rather than left buried inside the chain.

The governance value is not only that issues are found. It is that the organisation can show the method: what it looked for, when it looked, what it found, who was notified and what action followed.

PAYE and NIC Compliance is no longer proved by saying an umbrella was on a preferred supplier list. It is proved by producing a continuous record of control.

How the OPRaaS Virtual Compliance Director supports PAYE and NIC Compliance

OPRaaS, On-Pay-Roll-as-a-Service, is a systemised governance and workforce management partner for organisations that rely on temporary, contractor and contingent labour. Through OPRaaS’s Virtual Compliance Director solutions, we embed senior governance capability into your business without the cost of a full-time director, building audit-ready controls across JSL, IR35, CIS, GLAA, modern slavery and HMRC labour supply chain expectations.

The role of the OPRaaS VCD model is to turn dispersed compliance activity into a structured assurance position. Instead of relying on separate portals, inboxes, supplier files and periodic spreadsheets, the organisation can build one evidence record around the labour supply chain controls that matter.

Preferred supplier list umbrellas can be re-audited against the OPRaaS LSCA 2.0 methodology at defined intervals, with each re-audit producing a dated record inside the OPRaaS Defence File. Exceptions, supplier actions, worker-facing controls, pay-run evidence and governance responses can be captured as part of the same assurance record.

The platform also supports board-level reporting. A one-page JSL board report can summarise Executive snapshot, Exposure, Control maturity, Key incidents, Action plan and Forward look, giving directors a practical view of whether PAYE and NIC Compliance is being actively assured or merely assumed.

That distinction matters. When HMRC publishes its next receipts bulletin, the organisation should already know whether its labour supply chain evidence has strengthened, weakened or remained static.

What organisations should ask about PAYE and NIC Compliance now

The next HMRC receipts release is not just another data point. It is a reminder that PAYE and NIC Compliance sits at the meeting point between tax collection, labour supply chain governance and commercial risk.

Three questions are worth asking now:

1. The Defence File question. Which lines of our PAYE and NIC Compliance evidence could we produce on the day HMRC, a public-sector client, regulator or audit committee asks for them?
2. The supplier-list question. Which umbrellas on our preferred supplier list could withstand scrutiny without our balance sheet picking up the exposure?
3. The continuous-record question. Where in our supply chain do we hold one dated record of who is being paid, what they are being paid, what PAYE and NICs are being remitted, and how exceptions are resolved?

If the answer is unclear, the organisation may not have a PAYE and NIC Compliance problem on paper. It may have an evidence problem in practice.

That is where compliance becomes commercially useful. An organisation that can evidence its labour supply chain controls has something tangible: a file, a record, a methodology and a governance position. An organisation that cannot evidence those controls may only have confidence that its suppliers are doing the right thing.

As Joint and Several Liability beds in alongside each monthly HMRC bulletin, the practical next step is a thirty-minute scoping call to see how the OPRaaS VCD platform could turn PAYE and NIC Compliance into one continuous, board-ready record across the contingent workforce.

Compliance is your asset. Evidenced, every day.

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Drawing on HMRC’s monthly bulletin of 22 May 2026 on tax receipts and National Insurance contributions for the UK, Chapter 11 of Part 2 of the Income Tax (Earnings and Pensions) Act 2003, HMRC’s published supply-chain due-diligence guidance, ICAEW Tax Faculty commentary, and the OPRaaS LSCA 2.0 framework documentation including Module 11 of the OPRaaS LSCA Self-Certification Course.