Irish payroll deadlines and the employer calendar
Reviewed by Mellow Editorial Team, HR & payroll content team
Irish employers must submit payroll information to Revenue on or before each payday — there is no monthly batch filing. That real-time obligation shapes the entire employer calendar, and missing it carries penalties.
How real-time reporting works
Since 2019, Ireland has operated a real-time payroll system. Every time you pay an employee, you submit a Payroll Submission Request (PSR) to Revenue through ROS (Revenue Online Service) on or before that payment date. Revenue uses this to update each employee's tax record immediately.
This means there is no end-of-month payroll return to catch up on. If you pay weekly, you submit weekly. If you pay fortnightly, you submit fortnightly. The submission must reflect the actual amounts paid — gross pay, income tax deducted, USC, and PRSI — broken down per employee.
The payroll tax payment calendar
Submitting the PSR is separate from paying the tax you have collected. Employers remit PAYE, USC, and PRSI to Revenue on a monthly basis for most businesses, due by the 23rd of the month following the pay period (or the 14th if paying by cheque, though electronic payment is standard).
So if you run payroll in June 2026, those deductions must reach Revenue by 23 July 2026.
Smaller employers — broadly those with an annual liability under a certain threshold — may qualify for quarterly remittance instead. Revenue assigns this status; you do not self-select it. Check your ROS account or contact Revenue if you are unsure which schedule applies to you.
What you are collecting and remitting
For each employee on Class A PRSI, the deductions you manage are:
- Income tax at 20% on earnings up to roughly €44,000 (for a single person), and 40% on earnings above that. Ireland uses tax credits rather than a personal allowance, so each employee's net tax position depends on the credits Revenue has allocated to them via their Tax Credit Certificate.
- USC (Universal Social Charge) in bands: 0.5%, 2%, 3%, and 8%, depending on income level.
- Employee PRSI at approximately 4.1% of gross pay.
- Employer PRSI at approximately 11.15% of gross pay — this is your own cost, not a deduction from the employee.
You collect the employee portions through payroll and add the employer PRSI on top when remitting to Revenue.
Annual obligations and year-end
The Irish payroll year runs from 1 January to 31 December. Because reporting is real-time, there is no traditional P35 annual return — that was abolished when real-time reporting launched. However, you still have year-end tasks.
By 15 February each year, you must ensure all pay and deduction data for the previous year is finalised on ROS. Employees can view their own income and deduction summary through myAccount, so accuracy throughout the year matters — errors compound.
You are also required to give each employee a payslip for every pay period. This is a legal obligation under the Payment of Wages Act, not just good practice.
Statutory annual leave entitlement is four working weeks per year. While this is not a payroll filing deadline as such, accrued but untaken leave often affects final pay calculations when an employee leaves, and that payment is subject to the same real-time reporting rules as regular wages.
Pension auto-enrolment from 2026
My Future Fund, Ireland's pension auto-enrolment scheme, is being introduced from 2026. When it takes effect, employers will have additional obligations: enrolling eligible employees, deducting employee contributions, making employer contributions, and remitting both to the scheme administrator.
The payroll mechanics will sit alongside your existing PAYE/PRSI/USC process but involve a separate remittance channel. Employers should ensure their payroll software can handle auto-enrolment deductions before they become mandatory, and review their payroll calendar to account for the additional remittance step.
Common points of failure
The deadlines are mechanical, but the errors tend to be human. The most frequent problems are:
- Submitting a PSR after the payday rather than on or before it
- Using the wrong Tax Credit Certificate for an employee (always pull the latest one from ROS before running payroll)
- Forgetting to register a new employee with Revenue before their first pay date — you cannot submit a PSR for an unregistered employee
- Miscalculating employer PRSI, which is easy to overlook because it does not appear on the employee's payslip
- Missing the monthly remittance deadline because the PSR and the payment are treated as separate tasks
Revenue's systems flag late or missing submissions automatically, and interest accrues on late payments. Keeping a payroll calendar with both the submission dates and the remittance dates marked separately reduces the risk of conflating the two.
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