MTD Quarterly Updates: The Deadlines and How the Periods Work

Making Tax Digital for Income Tax is no longer coming. It arrived on 6 April 2026. HMRC put the first wave at 864,000 sole traders and landlords, and two more waves follow in 2027 and 2028.

This guide sets out who is in scope and when, what the obligation actually involves day to day, and the deadlines that now sit in the calendar alongside the Self Assessment deadline rather than replacing it. Every date and threshold here comes from HMRC's own guidance, because the Making Tax Digital timetable has been deferred more than once and older summaries are still circulating with dates that never happened.

What Making Tax Digital actually is

Making Tax Digital, usually shortened to MTD, is HMRC's programme for moving tax reporting onto digital records and compatible software. In practice it means three things: keeping records digitally rather than on paper or in a spreadsheet that nothing can read, sending HMRC updates during the year rather than only after it, and filing through software rather than typing figures into a web form.

It has been rolled out tax by tax, which is why the picture looks confusing. VAT is finished. Income Tax is in progress. Corporation Tax is not scheduled.

MTD for VAT: already done

This phase is complete. HMRC's current position is that all VAT-registered businesses should now be signed up for Making Tax Digital for VAT, and that you no longer need to sign up yourself.

If you are VAT registered, you are already in it. The practical obligations are digital record keeping and submitting VAT returns through compatible software.

MTD for Income Tax: the thresholds and the dates

This is the part that is live now and the part most people mean when they ask about MTD.

You need to use Making Tax Digital for Income Tax if all of the following apply: you are a sole trader or a landlord registered for Self Assessment, you have income from self-employment or property or both, and your qualifying income is above the relevant threshold for the tax year.

The thresholds step down over three years, and each one is tested against a tax year two years before it bites:

• Qualifying income over £50,000 for the 2024 to 2025 tax year — you should have started from 6 April 2026. If you have not signed up, you still can.
• Qualifying income over £30,000 for the 2025 to 2026 tax year — you will need to use it from 6 April 2027.
• Qualifying income over £20,000 for the 2026 to 2027 tax year — you will need to use it from 6 April 2028.

HMRC publishes a separate calculation for working out your qualifying income, and it is worth using rather than estimating, because the threshold test decides whether you are in scope at all.

Two further conditions apply to signing up: you must be registered for Self Assessment, and you must have submitted a tax return in the last two years.

Partnerships are not in scope yet. HMRC has said partnerships will need to use Making Tax Digital for Income Tax in future and that it will set out the timeline at a later date. No date has been published.

The letter is not the obligation

HMRC reviews each Self Assessment return and writes to taxpayers whose qualifying income is above the threshold, confirming they need to start by the beginning of the following tax year.

That letter is a courtesy, not the trigger. HMRC is explicit that if you did not receive a letter, it remains your responsibility to check whether and when you need to use the service, and to be signed up and ready. Anyone relying on a letter arriving has misread how this works.

What you actually have to do each year

Three obligations replace the single annual return, and the annual return does not go away.

1. Keep digital records

Self-employment and property income and expenses have to be created and stored digitally, in software that can talk to HMRC. For anyone whose records currently live in a shoebox or an unstructured spreadsheet, this is the real change, and it is worth understanding the underlying discipline rather than just buying software — our guide to bookkeeping journal entries covers the mechanics that the software is automating.

2. Send quarterly updates

This is the obligation people underestimate, and there is a detail in it that most summaries get wrong.

The standard update periods are cumulative. Each one runs from 6 April, not from the end of the previous quarter, so every update is a year-to-date position rather than a discrete three months:

There is also a calendar option, which keeps the same deadlines but aligns the periods to calendar quarters:

An update can be sent any time after the period ends, up to and including the deadline. It can also be sent up to 10 days before the period ends if you know no further transactions are coming, which is useful if a deadline falls across a holiday.

3. Submit the tax return

The quarterly updates do not replace the return. You still finalise the year and submit, now through MTD software. You also still need to submit a Self Assessment return for the tax year before you start using Making Tax Digital.

Exemptions

Exemptions exist and are not unusual. HMRC gives being digitally excluded as an example. An exemption removes the MTD obligation but not the reporting obligation: you must still report income and gains through a Self Assessment return.

What about Corporation Tax?

HMRC consulted on extending Making Tax Digital to Corporation Tax and published a summary of responses, but no start date has been announced. Anyone planning a practice around a Corporation Tax deadline is planning around something that does not exist yet. For the current regime, see our practical guide to UK Corporation Tax.

What this means if you work in practice

The quarterly cycle changes the shape of the year more than it changes the volume of work. Four submission points per client per year, each with a deadline on the 7th, turns a seasonal compression around January into a rolling obligation with four pinch points in August, November, February and May.

Two consequences follow. Client records have to be current throughout the year rather than reconstructed afterwards, which moves the bookkeeping conversation from an annual clean-up to a continuous one. And the February deadline sits three weeks after the Self Assessment deadline, so the busiest month in the calendar now has a second obligation landing immediately behind it.

For anyone moving into this work, or supporting clients through the transition, structured bookkeeping training is the foundation the software sits on top of.

Checking your own position

HMRC publishes a tool that checks whether you need to use Making Tax Digital for Income Tax, when you need to start, and whether you may be exempt. It can be used on behalf of someone else, which matters for agents.

Given that the timetable has moved before, and that thresholds step down in 2027 and 2028, the sensible discipline is to re-check each year against the actual tax year HMRC tests rather than assuming last year's answer still holds.