HMRC Call Waiting Times and Letter Response Times

 

I asked Claude to present me with the statistics about HMRC's customer service standards over the last 5 years wrt call answering times and letter response times.

Here is its response: 

"Here's the trend for HMRC's two biggest phone lines over the last five years. Both got dramatically worse until 2022-24, then started improving — though not at the same pace.

 

Call answer times (minutes:seconds)

Year	Self Assessment helpline	Employers helpline
2020-21	15:12	09:07
2021-22	17:07	12:03
2022-23	25:14	16:03
2023-24	37:15	22:20
2024-25	23:40	26:32

The Self Assessment line peaked at over 37 minutes in 2023-24 (the year the Public Accounts Committee accused HMRC of deliberately degrading phone service to push people online) before improving to 23:40 in 2024-25. The Employers line went the other way — it kept getting worse into 2024-25, largely because of industrial action from December 2024 to June 2025. Overall call-answering rate (percentage of adviser attempts handled) was 71.5% in 2024-25 against an 85% target; it's since climbed to around 83–84% for April–September 2025.

Letter/correspondence response times (% answered within 15 working days, target 80%)

Year	% within 15 days
2020-21	Below target (pandemic-era decline)
2021-22	45.5%
2022-23	73%
2023-24	76%
2024-25	76.9%
Q1 2025-26 (Apr–Jun)	69.5% (dip — staff pulled onto phones for the Self Assessment peak)
Q2 2025-26 (Jul–Sep)	78.9%, improving to 87% by quarter end

Post has consistently missed its 80% target every year for the last five years. The lowest point was 2021-22, during the pandemic backlog, when fewer than half of letters got a reply within 15 days.

The bigger picture: the National Audit Office found taxpayers collectively spent 798 years on hold in 2022-23 and 558 years in 2024-25 — an improvement, but still enormous. HMRC received £51m in extra funding in May 2024 and a further £500m from the 2025 Spending Review, aimed at getting 90% of customer interactions to self-service/digital channels by 2029-30 (currently around 70-80%, depending on the quarter). Both call answering and 15-day correspondence figures remain below HMRC's own targets as of the latest published data (Q2 2025-26)."

I queried the letter response figures: 

"Good instinct to question that — the "% within 15 working days" figure hides a lot. Let me dig into the actual average/median wait, not just the target-hit rate.You're right to push on that — and the "76.9% within 15 days" headline is misleading in an important way.

That statistic is a blended figure across simple correspondence — the bulk of what HMRC receives is straightforward stuff (change of address, simple claims, acknowledgements) that genuinely can be turned around fast. It's not representative of complex cases.

For anything more involved, the picture is very different:

• HMRC runs an official "check when you can expect a reply" tool that individuals can use to see expected wait times for specific types of query. One RSM UK review found the tool showing a response time of 203 days (29 weeks) for online applications and letters requesting repayment, and 147 days (21 weeks) for paper returns.
• Accountants and agents routinely report enquiry cases, complex repayment disputes, and non-standard correspondence taking 3–10+ months, based on forum and professional-body accounts — well beyond the "average" 15-day figure.
• HMRC's own internal guidance sets separate targets for dealing with correspondence within both 15 and 40 working days, and instructs staff to send an interim acknowledgement — rather than a full reply — when the 15-day target can't be met. That acknowledgement can itself count toward "responding," while the substantive reply comes much later.

So the two things you've heard are both true and not really in conflict: the headline stat (which drives the target) covers the mass of simple, quickly-resolved post; the "several months" experience is what happens once your letter falls into a queue for anything requiring actual casework — enquiries, disputes, complex repayments. 

HMRC doesn't publish a clean average/median turnaround time across all correspondence types in its regular statistics, which is part of why the gap between the headline % and lived experience is so wide. If you want, I can dig further into whether there's a published median/mean figure (rather than just % hitting the 15-day target) for a specific type of correspondence you're dealing with."

 

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