Quarterly updates started in April 2026 for anyone over £50,000. The rules are simple; the habits are the hard part.
If you are a sole trader or a landlord with qualifying income over £50,000, Making Tax Digital for Income Tax already applies to you. It started on 6 April 2026, and it is not a change to how much tax you pay. It is a change to how often you talk to HMRC, and that turns out to be the part people underestimate.
Under Self Assessment you had one deadline and, realistically, one weekend of panic. Under MTD for Income Tax you keep digital records as you go, send HMRC four quarterly updates through the year, and finish with a final declaration that confirms and adjusts the full-year position. The final declaration replaces the tax return you are used to.
Nothing about this is optional once your income is over the threshold, and HMRC can charge penalties where updates are late or missing.
The rules arrive in bands, and which band you are in depends on your qualifying income in an earlier tax year:
Qualifying income means the combined gross income from self-employment and property, before expenses. That word combined is the one that catches people. If you take £28,000 from a small business and £24,000 in rent, neither figure looks like a threshold on its own, and together they are over £50,000.
Partnerships are expected to join later. No start date has been announced.
The rules are not complicated. The habits are.
Records that are not digital. A drawer of receipts and a spreadsheet you tidy up in January will not survive a quarterly cycle. Income and expenditure have to be recorded digitally, in software HMRC recognises.
Leaving it to the deadline. A quarterly update is only light work if the quarter's bookkeeping is already done. Left to the last week, you do a year's worth of catching up four times instead of once.
Assuming an accountant will simply absorb it. We can, and we do. But the four submissions still depend on the records reaching us, and the firms that find MTD painless are the ones whose clients send things monthly rather than annually.
If you are already in scope, the useful question is not whether your software is compliant. It is whether your bookkeeping is close enough to current that a quarterly update is a half-hour job.
If you are not in scope yet, you have the better opportunity: the year before you join is when a new routine costs you nothing to establish. Moving to digital records now means your first quarterly update is simply a submission, rather than a change of habit and a deadline arriving together.
We take clients through this as a matter of course, and we would rather have the conversation early than sort out a missed quarter afterwards. If you are not certain which band you fall into, or whether your two income streams add up to more than you think, that is a short conversation and worth having.