But Why The 6th?

Have you ever wondered why the Payroll Tax Year starts on the 6th April? We did too......

When asked, most people in our office suspected that it was aligned with the UK Government’s Financial Year, which whilst this sounded plausible it still wouldn’t have answered why they chose the 6th of the month rather than the 1st, but they were wrong anyway.

The reason for this date is because of the calendar and the tax man. Back in the Middle Ages the calendar was made up of quarters, with the first day of each quarter falling on a religious festival (24 June = Midsummer Day, 25 December = Christmas, 25 March = Lady Day and 29 September = Michaelmas). Traditionally each of the four quarter days were when employers hired their servants, pay was processed and all rents were due to be paid. Lady Day was in fact the 1st day of the New Year and it therefore also made sense that it was the start of the Financial Year too. In 1752 the 1st January became recognised as the start of the calendar year but the tax authorities found it unacceptable to lose out on 11 days of revenue (caused by leap year differences between the Gregorian calendar and the Julian calendar) and so they moved the Tax year start date to the 5th April. It remained as the 5th April until 1799 when the powers that be decided to ‘skip’ a leap year and so the tax authorities moved the start of the tax year to the 6th April.

So now you know!

13/04/11 - Of course there may well be more than one plausible explanation as to why the 6th April is the start of the tax year! James Cooper from Ripon Select Foods wrote in to the blog to put the case forward for an alternative reason behind the date. We've included James' response below to add further explanation for the reasons behind the choice of the 6th.

I believe it is much simpler than that and is related to agricultural workers and 'flitting day'. A journeyman agricultural worker would be employed for a year ending 5th April, when his contract was up he would pack up all his possessions including wife and family and move on to another farm. Just why the 5th I am not sure but logically a spring flit makes sense. He would have had to leave his small piece of allotted ground fallow and dug over ready for the next worker to then spring plant seeds, potatoes etc.