About us
Built by the two people who would have answered your call
For five years the two of us sat on HMRC’s phone lines, 8am to 6pm, Monday to Friday, taking calls from taxpayers about PAYE and Self Assessment. EaseMyTax is what we wished we could have sent every caller.
Where this came from
Every day the questions were the same. What does this tax code mean? Why do I owe this? Which form gets my refund? Do I need to do a tax return? Some calls were complicated, but most were the same handful of questions asked by different people, and by the end of every call the person understood exactly what HMRC was asking of them.
After a while the pattern was impossible to miss: the guidance people were sent to did not explain things the way a person on the phone would. We raised it inside the department. Nothing changed. So we built the explanation ourselves.
We were those callers too. Neither of us understood our own tax code before we worked there. Tax is not taught in school, and unless you work in payroll, finance or the tax office itself, nobody ever sits you down and explains a P2 or a Simple Assessment.
We trained on both PAYE and Self Assessment and stayed in the same department for the whole five years on purpose, to learn every corner of it. That is what is on this site: not tax theory, but what actually happens to real people’s codes, bills and refunds, and how to put it right.
There are two of us, and we are partners in this. Everything on the site was written by people who have said it out loud to a taxpayer, checked it against GOV.UK, and watched it work.
Why it exists
Help should not cost £250 to £500
That is what an accountant charges for a visit, and most of the people who rang us did not need one. They needed someone to explain the letter in front of them. That should not cost anything, and here it does not.
The answer is usually simple
Once a code or a bill is explained line by line, almost everyone can deal with it themselves. We put the explanation an adviser gives on the phone into a page you can read at your own pace, as many times as you like.
Giving something back
We took thousands of these calls. This is the version of the answer we always wanted to give: complete, in plain English, with the arithmetic shown so you can check it.
In your language
The people who found HMRC hardest to deal with were often the ones for whom English was a second language. Every page here is in fifteen languages, with every figure exactly as HMRC prints it.
What we promise
- Free, no account, and nothing you type is sent to HMRC or to us.
- Every rate and allowance is checked against GOV.UK for each tax year, and each step links to the official page so you can check it yourself.
- The why, every time: what HMRC did, why, and what you can do about it, not just a number.
- We never file anything for you and never ask for your Government Gateway login. You stay in control of your own tax.
- If a page cannot answer your question, tell us with the Ask us button and we will build the answer in.
Why the ‘My’ in EaseMyTax
Because it is personal. We were taxpayers who did not understand our own tax before we sat on the other end of the phone, and this site is built for the version of us who rang in.
Independent of HMRC
EaseMyTax is our own project. It is not part of HMRC, not endorsed by HMRC, and nothing here is regulated tax advice. What we know comes from the phones; what you do with it stays your own decision, and every answer links to the GOV.UK page it came from.
Start where the call would have started
Tell us which letter you got, or check whether you need to file, and we take it from there.