Making Tax Digital for Income Tax is not one date. It is three dates.
Which one applies to you depends on your qualifying income. Not on what kind of business you run.
Are you a sole trader or landlord who files Self Assessment? This is for you. Do you advise someone who is? This is for you too.
You need to know when you get pulled in. And what changes on that day.
MTD is a different way of keeping records, all year round. Not a new form once a year.
One thing first. We are not tax advisers. Nothing here is tax advice.
For the rules that actually govern your filing, go to gov.uk's own guidance. Not this post.
What follows is the practical shape of the change. What the year looks like once you are in it. What running it without losing your Tuesdays actually takes. Who it hits.
Who gets pulled in, and when
Each one is based on your qualifying income from the year before it takes effect. Three start dates. Three thresholds.
| From | Qualifying income threshold | Based on tax year |
|---|---|---|
| 6 April 2026 | over £50,000 | 2024-25 |
| 6 April 2027 | over £30,000 | 2025-26 |
| 6 April 2028 | over £20,000 | 2026-27 |
It covers sole traders and landlords on Self Assessment, once they're over the threshold for their start date. There is no separate rule for company size or industry.
It is one number, checked against one prior year. And another band of people gets pulled in. Every April, the threshold drops.
What the quarterly rhythm actually feels like
Once you are mandated, four new deadlines land in your year: 7 August, 7 November, 7 February and 7 May. LITRG's guidance on the MTD timeline sets these out.
Each one needs digital records. Updated close to real time, not reconstructed from a shoebox in January. Kept in compatible software.
That is the real change under MTD. A different schedule for producing the same numbers. Not more tax.
If you have more than one income source, each one needs its own quarterly updates.
A landlord who also runs a sole trade is filing eight quarterly submissions a year, not four. You track the two income streams separately.
It is easy to plan for one rhythm and discover you are running two. That arithmetic is worth sitting with before the first deadline arrives.
Getting your records into good shape matters here. Not a scramble to rebuild three months of receipts and bank lines. A quarterly update becomes a five-minute job.
We have written about turning that record-chasing into a system you can run. The software matters far less than whether your records are current. That is its own piece of work.
What the soft landing does and does not cover
HMRC's penalty system for MTD runs on points. One point for each missed quarterly submission, with a fixed penalty at four, as ICAEW's summary sets out. The full mechanics are in our piece on record chasing.
For the first year, 2026-27, there is a soft landing. No penalty points for late quarterly updates. LITRG explains this here.
But that is narrower than it sounds.
Late-payment penalties still apply, and so do late Self Assessment return penalties. Both keep their normal rules through the soft-landing year.
HMRC suspends only one thing: the penalty for a missed quarterly update. Not the penalty system as a whole.
The points start counting for real the moment the soft landing ends. Build the habit properly in year one anyway.
The Self Assessment return does not go away
Quarterly updates run alongside your annual return. Not instead of it.
The 2025-26 Self Assessment return is still due 31 January 2027, on the usual timetable, as this MTD guide sets out. Whether or not you filed quarterly updates all year.
It does not remove the one you already had. MTD adds a filing rhythm.
For a business owner, this is an operations problem
What MTD actually asks for is discipline. Set the tax rules aside for a moment.
Catch records close to the moment they happen. Pull them into a submission, four times a year. Same way, every time.
Built badly, it is four small January panics instead of one big one. Built properly once, a system like that runs itself.
This is the kind of work we build to handle. Not the tax judgement.
The practical work: map out what has to happen, on what schedule, with what checks, before anything goes to HMRC.
An AI agent is a computer worker that does one job for you. We build them, run them, and check their work every month.
Is your business running work like this on whoever-has-time effort, with no set process? That is the gap our Reports service is built for.
For practices, this is a capacity problem
For a practice, every mandated client multiplies the filing calendar, and the totals climb fast. This is a scheduling and capacity problem, not a client-service one.
We went through that arithmetic properly, deadline by deadline, in our piece on MTD quarterly capacity.
Want a second pair of eyes on your own process? Quarterly bookkeeping, record chasing, or the capacity plan behind it.
We will look at whether it holds up under this timeline. Just a plain look at what is solid and what is not. No sales pitch.