If you are self-employed in the UK and a Spanish bank or authority asks you to evidence your income, you will end up with two HMRC documents that look redundant and are not. Submitting only one is the commonest reason for being asked for the other two weeks later.
What each one says
| Document | What it contains | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| SA302 (tax calculation) | The tax calculation: income declared by category and the resulting liability | Your Self Assessment return |
| Tax Year Overview | What is recorded on your HMRC account for that year: amount and payments | HMRC's own record |
The difference is the source, and that is why they complement each other. The SA302 is a calculation made on what you declared. The Tax Year Overview is what the administration has on record. Together, one gives the figure and the other confirms the figure is in the system.
Hence UK lenders asking for them as a pair for years now, and a well-informed Spanish recipient doing the same. If you only have one, expect to be asked for the other.
The UK tax year is not the calendar year
This detail causes more confusion than everything above put together, and it is worth getting ahead of.
The UK tax year runs 6 April to the following 5 April. So a document for 2025/26 covers April 2025 to April 2026. If a Spanish bank asks for "your 2025 return", what arrives will not line up with the Spanish calendar year, and a member of staff unfamiliar with it may read that as missing information or wrong dates.
There is nothing to correct: the document is right. What helps is submitting it pre-explained. One line in the email — "UK tax years run April to April, so the attached document covers April 2025 to April 2026" — saves a phone call and stops anyone assuming there is an error.
And clarify which period they want before requesting the documents from HMRC: if what they need is calendar-year 2025 income, they may have to look at two UK tax years.
Proof of income and tax residency are different things
This is the other common conflation, and it is worth separating cleanly:
| If you are asked for… | The document is… |
|---|---|
| Declared income and the tax calculated | SA302 |
| Confirmation those amounts are on record at HMRC | Tax Year Overview |
| Where you are tax resident | An HMRC certificate of tax residence |
The third is a different document, with a different purpose and a different way of being obtained. We cover it in the UK tax residence certificate. An SA302 does not evidence residency, and a residence certificate does not evidence how much you earned.
How to prepare both documents
Before asking for a quote, check four things on each document:
- The tax year, and that it is the same on both. A 2024/25 SA302 with a 2025/26 Tax Year Overview do not corroborate each other.
- The taxpayer, with your name as it appears on your identification. If you trade under a business name, the document will be in your personal name.
- Complete pages. An SA302 usually runs to several, with the amounts spread across them; a single page leaves the calculation cut off.
- The currency. The figures are in pounds. They stay in pounds in the translation: converting them to euros would mean inventing an exchange rate and a date, which is neither the translator's job nor what the recipient wants.
And one check on how you obtain them: download the documents through HMRC's own channels and keep them as PDFs. A screenshot of your account is not the document, and a PDF printed and rescanned loses quality exactly where the figures are.
Submission checklist and quote
- Ask the recipient for their specific list: which documents, and for which years.
- Download the SA302 and the Tax Year Overview for the same year from HMRC.
- Check taxpayer, year, pages and legibility.
- If the destination is a property purchase, see what else goes in the package: documents for buying property in Spain as a British citizen.
- Order the translation of UK tax documentation once you have both final documents.
What does not pay off is translating one first and the other later. That is two orders instead of one, and documents from the same file are better translated together, with the same terminology.
Send us the complete SA302 and Tax Year Overview for the same tax year, the body they are going to and your deadline, and we will give you the exact price and turnaround.