Making Tax Digital for Income Tax is the largest change to how self-employed people and landlords report to HMRC in a generation. It does not change how much tax you pay. It changes how often you talk to HMRC, and how your records have to be kept.
From April 2026, if your qualifying income from self-employment and property is above £50,000, you will need to keep digital records and send HMRC a quarterly summary of your income and expenses. After the tax year ends you submit a final declaration that pulls everything together — the job Self Assessment does today.
The threshold then falls to £30,000 in April 2027 and £20,000 in April 2028. That last step brings in a lot of people who have never thought of themselves as running a business: the single-property landlord, the weekend trader, the consultant with one client.
The part people underestimate is the record-keeping. Quarterly submissions are only painless if the underlying bookkeeping is already current. A shoebox of receipts reconciled once a year in January simply does not survive contact with four deadlines.
Our advice is to move early. Getting your records onto compatible software a full year before your start date means the first real submission is routine rather than an event. It also means you see your numbers four times a year instead of once, which turns out to be the genuinely useful side effect of all this.