NO

As of 12 August 2026, AI cannot do your payroll.

This still needs a person who signs their name to it.

Can you do it?

15 minutesto a draft.

n/ait cannot be self-verified.

Cost, all in£0

Skill neededchat-fluent

Who has to check ita professional

What the alternative costsPayroll software for a small team commonly runs £5 to £10 a month; an accountant or bureau commonly charges £4 to £10 per payslip.

If this goes wrong: someone you employ is paid wrongly and HMRC holds you responsible for the missed real-time submission, with penalties and back-corrections that follow into later months.

What to actually do

  1. Hand it to a person

    The route this page recommends

    Someone with a licence or accountable authority has to sign this before it counts.

    Where to find a person today

    • ICAEW Find a Chartered Accountant

      The ICAEW’s public directory of regulated chartered accountancy firms, searchable by location and specialism.

      Payroll penalties attach to the employer, so when payroll stops being simple the honest route is a professional whose name goes on the filings: the ICAEW register is the vetted way to find one.

  2. Use a tool built for this

    Second choice

    Purpose-built software does the mechanical share of this.

    • HMRC Basic PAYE Tools

      Free

      HMRC's own free payroll software for employers with fewer than ten employees: it calculates tax and National Insurance and submits real time information, which is exactly the part a chat cannot do.

    • Xero

      Payroll as an add-on to accounting software keeps pay, pensions and the ledger in one place once a team outgrows the free tools.

  3. Do it yourself

    The distant third

    A chat interface gets you a draft, but you cannot verify it yourself. That is the catch.

    Prompt

    List the information I need to have ready before each monthly payroll run for a small UK team, the real time information submissions and their deadlines, and the statutory rates I must re-check every April. Do not calculate anyone's pay, tax or National Insurance, and do not tell me what any employee should receive.

    Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.

What it gets wrong

What makes this a NO: legal accountability, stakes of error and verification cost.

How we scored this

Five axes, each scored nought to two by hand: ten means AI carries the task cleanly, and the thresholds that turn a total into YES, PARTLY or NO are published in the methodology. Each axis name links to its definition.

AxisScore (0–2)
Output1
Inputs1
Verification0
Liability0
Effort delta1
Total3 / 10

The methodology and its thresholds are published in full.

FAQ

Can AI run our payroll?
No. The answer here is NO. UK payroll is a filing obligation, not a document: pay data must reach HMRC through real time information on or before payday, the liability is the employer's, and a chat's confident tax calculations cannot be verified without redoing them.
Can ChatGPT work out my employee's tax and NI?
It will produce a number, and that is the problem. Tax codes, National Insurance categories and pension thresholds change every April and interact in edge cases, checking its answer means redoing the calculation, and the cost of a miss lands on your employee's payslip.
What can AI safely do for our payroll?
The preparation and the explanations. Ask it what to have ready before each run, what the April changes mean in plain English, and what questions to put to your accountant. Keep every calculation and every submission inside payroll software or with a professional.
What does payroll software cost for a small business?
HMRC's Basic PAYE Tools is free for employers with fewer than ten employees. Commercial payroll software commonly runs £5 to £10 a month for a small team, and an accountant or bureau commonly charges £4 to £10 per payslip.

Nearby answers

All Payroll rulings

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