How to find your income and pay history in myIR, and keep your own

Proof of income or income details: which to print

Inland Revenue offers two PDFs from the same data, and they suit different requests. To print either, log in to myIR, select More... on your Income tax account, choose Print proof of income or Print income details under My income, and set the From and To dates. If you do not have myIR, Inland Revenue says you can contact it to request a summary of income instead.

Choose Proof of income when someone only needs to know what you earned in a period. It is shorter and shows less, because it leaves out who paid you and when. Choose Income details when the request asks for monthly income or a breakdown by employer, or when you are rebuilding your own history, because it is the only printout that shows each employer month by month. Proof of income also leaves out self-employed and rental income, so if you have either, check what the person asking actually needs.

What the income summary shows, employer by employer

The on-screen summary in myIR goes further than either printout. The overview lists each type of income, such as salary and wages, interest or a taxable benefit, with the amount before tax and any deductions. To change the period, select Other and change the From and To dates.

View breakdown is where the detail is. For each employer it shows the gross amount, the deductions and the totals for each period your employer reported, which for wages usually means each pay. Each employer has a Source total row, and a combined table adds up all your salary, wages, benefits and taxable pensions: total gross income, PAYE, the ACC earners' levy, tax deducted, student loan deductions and earnings not liable for ACC.

Select More detail on any employer's row and myIR shows the pay details for that period, including the tax code your employer used. It is the quickest way to check the code every employer applied, pay by pay.

Spotting a wrong tax code across a year

Your tax code tells each employer how much tax to take. Inland Revenue says you need one code for your main or highest source of income, and a secondary code for any other income you receive at the same time. Its secondary codes depend on your estimated annual total income from all sources:

Open More detail on a few pays from each employer in the year and look for three common problems:

• M on two jobs at once. Inland Revenue gives this as its own example of a wrong code. When it notices, it asks the employer to change the code and tells you. Until then, the second job is taxed as if it were your only income, which usually means too little tax.
• A code that never changed. Inland Revenue says to choose a new code when you take out or pay off a student loan, when your expected income changes, or when you change jobs or start a second job. A code with SL still running after the loan is paid, or a secondary code chosen for a lower income, shows up here.
• No declaration. If an employer never received your IR330 tax code declaration, Inland Revenue says it deducts tax at the non-declaration rate of 45%.

The tax year ends on 31 March. If your only income was salary, wages or taxed investment income, Inland Revenue sends an income tax assessment, from the last weekend in May into June and July, showing whether you paid the right amount, are due a refund or have tax to pay. If anything on it is wrong, you must tell Inland Revenue. For a quick estimate of what a wrong code cost or saved you, Calculate.co.nz has a wrong tax code refund calculator, and our article on secondary tax with two jobs covers choosing the right code for a second job.

Rebuilding your salary history

If you need your previous salaries for an application form, a mortgage broker or a pay negotiation, the breakdown gets you most of the way. myIR records what you were actually paid before tax, pay by pay, which is close to your salary but not the same thing.

The method is simple. Find an ordinary pay for each job, one with no overtime, bonus, back pay or leave paid out, and multiply its gross amount by the number of pays in a year: 52 for weekly, 26 for fortnightly or 12 for monthly. As an invented example, an ordinary fortnightly gross pay of $3,269.23, times 26, is $84,999.98, so the salary was $85,000 a year. Where the gross jumps and stays up, that is the date of a pay rise. Treat the first and last pays from each employer with care, since they are often part periods, and a last pay usually includes holiday pay.

Write the result down as a short list: employer, job title, from and to dates, and the salary at each change. The Income details PDF is your evidence if anyone asks.

Whether to share it is a separate decision. Our article on what to do when an application form asks for your current salary covers answering with your expected pay and a range built from the market, and our guide to salary negotiation in New Zealand treats your own pay history as the best benchmark for next time. If the rebuilt numbers look low against what the role pays elsewhere, our article on whether you are being underpaid sets out where reliable New Zealand pay data comes from and how to compare.

Keep your own record from now on

Rebuilding a history from myIR takes an evening, and it only tells you what was paid. It does not tell you what you agreed, when your review was due, or what the rise was for. Those are easy to note at the time and hard to rebuild later.

From today, keep a short record of every pay change in the job you hold: the date it applied from, the new figure, and a line on why. A payslip or a letter confirming each rise is worth keeping with it.

Your Career keeps that record for you. Start with what you are paid now, then add the earlier changes in the same job with the dates they applied from, using the figures you found in myIR, and it shows your pay over time, what it is worth after prices using Stats NZ's consumers price index, and your next pay review with a reminder ahead of it. When you leave, the job and its last salary stay under Jobs you have held.

Start your own pay record