On 7 August 2026, roughly three weeks from now, the first ever quarterly update under Making Tax Digital for Income Tax falls due. If you are a UK sole trader or landlord with qualifying income over £50,000, this is the first hard deadline of a system that replaces the once-a-year Self Assessment scramble with four updates a year plus a final tax return.
Plenty of personal trainers, tutors, coaches, and clinic owners crossed that £50,000 line without thinking of themselves as the kind of business HMRC writes to. If that is you, here is exactly what is due, what a quarterly update actually contains, and why the businesses with organised client and payment records will find the whole thing a non-event.
Who has to file by 7 August 2026
Making Tax Digital for Income Tax became mandatory on 6 April 2026 for sole traders and landlords whose qualifying income was more than £50,000 in the 2024 to 2025 tax year. Qualifying income means your combined gross income from self-employment and property, before expenses. HMRC checked 2024 to 2025 Self Assessment returns and wrote to everyone affected.
The threshold drops in stages, so even if you are under it today, you may not be for long.
| Mandated from | Qualifying income over | Based on tax year |
|---|---|---|
| 6 April 2026 | £50,000 | 2024 to 2025 |
| 6 April 2027 | £30,000 | 2025 to 2026 |
| 6 April 2028 | £20,000 | 2026 to 2027 |
A busy personal trainer charging £50 a session, or a tutoring business running 25 lessons a week in term time, clears £30,000 comfortably. The 2027 and 2028 waves will pull in a large share of the UK's service businesses. You can check your own position on the gov.uk eligibility guidance ↗.
What a quarterly update actually is
The good news first: a quarterly update is not a tax return. There is no tax calculation to agonise over, no accounting adjustments, and no payment due alongside it. It is a summary of your income and expense totals, by category, sent to HMRC from MTD-compatible software using digital records.
Three things surprise people about how it works.
- It is totals only. HMRC receives the sum of each income and expense category you use. Individual invoices, receipts, and client names are never sent.
- Updates are cumulative. Each update covers from the start of the tax year to the end of the update period. If you make a mistake in quarter one, you simply correct it and the next update carries the fix. Nothing needs resubmitting.
- Nil updates are still required. If a business had no income or expenses in the period, you must still send an update for it, and you must send updates separately for each self-employment or property business you run.
The deadlines for the year
By default, update periods follow the tax year. You can instead elect calendar update periods in your software, which line up with calendar quarters and are easier to reconcile against monthly bank statements. Either way, the deadlines are identical.
| Standard period | Calendar period | Deadline |
|---|---|---|
| 6 April to 5 July | 1 April to 30 June | 7 August 2026 |
| 6 April to 5 October | 1 April to 30 September | 7 November 2026 |
| 6 April to 5 January | 1 April to 31 December | 7 February 2027 |
| 6 April to 5 April | 1 April to 31 March | 7 May 2027 |
Full details of the periods and what each update must contain are in the gov.uk quarterly updates guidance ↗. After the four updates, you still submit a tax return for the year with your final figures and adjustments, and the usual 31 January payment date does not change.
What to do before 7 August
If you have received an HMRC letter and done nothing yet, this is the order to work in.
- Confirm you are actually in scope. Check your 2024 to 2025 gross self-employment and property income against the £50,000 threshold. If you are exempt, for example digitally excluded, you need to apply for the exemption rather than assume it.
- Pick MTD-compatible software. Only recognised software can send updates. Gov.uk maintains a list of compatible products, including some free options. Your accountant may already have this covered.
- Get April to June into digital records. The first update covers roughly April to June 2026. Every session, lesson, appointment, and rent receipt from that period needs to be in your records, categorised, before you can submit.
- Decide standard or calendar quarters. If you reconcile against bank statements, calendar quarters are usually simpler. The election is made in your software.
- Submit early, not on 7 August. First-time authorisation between your software and HMRC can throw up snags. Leave yourself a buffer.
Common mistakes to avoid
Accountants who ran clients through HMRC's testing phase report the same handful of failure modes, and none of them are about tax knowledge.
- Reconstructing the quarter from memory. The classic sole trader move: a shoebox of receipts and a bank statement, decoded once a year in January. That approach collapses under quarterly deadlines. Cash payments for sessions, in particular, vanish from memory within weeks.
- Missing income sources. A tutor who also rents out a flat has two businesses and two sets of updates. Forgetting the second one is an easy miss.
- Skipping a nil quarter. Quiet summer term? A clinic closed for refurbishment? The update is still due.
- Leaving software setup to deadline week. Authorising software against your HMRC account is a one-off job, but it is not instant, and support queues in early August will be long.
Late submissions sit under HMRC's points-based penalty regime: a point per missed deadline, and a £200 fixed penalty once you reach the points threshold. With four deadlines a year instead of one, the cost of a chaotic bookkeeping habit has quadrupled.
Why organised client records make this painless
Here is the pattern we see across service businesses: the hard part of a quarterly update is not the submission, it is knowing what you actually earned. If every client, session, and payment already lives in one system, producing a quarter's income figure takes minutes. If it lives across a diary, a WhatsApp thread, three bank accounts, and memory, it takes a weekend.
This is where a CRM earns its keep. To be clear, a CRM like Kabooly is not MTD filing software and does not replace it. What it does is fix the upstream problem: it gives you a clean, dated record of every client, every booking, and every payment as it happens, so your quarterly bookkeeping becomes a transcription job rather than an archaeology dig.
For a personal trainer, that means every session and block booking logged against the client who paid for it. For a tutoring business, it means term fees and ad hoc lessons tracked per family. For a clinic, it means appointments and payments in one timeline instead of scattered across a booking system and a card terminal report. Come the 7th of the month, you export the quarter, hand it to your software or accountant, and get back to work.
Kabooly comes with a 30 day free trial, so there is time to get your records straight before the November deadline even if August is already a write-off. See the features and pricing pages, or get in touch if you want to talk it through.
Frequently asked questions
Do I pay any tax on 7 August 2026?
No. Quarterly updates carry no payment. Your tax is still calculated after the year end and paid by 31 January as normal, with payments on account where they apply. The updates do give HMRC, and you, an in-year picture of your income, which makes the eventual bill less of a surprise.
I am under £50,000. Can I ignore MTD?
For now, yes, but check the timetable. The threshold falls to £30,000 in April 2027 and £20,000 in April 2028, judged on gross income before expenses. A growing service business can cross those lines quickly, and building tidy record-keeping habits now is far easier than adopting them under a deadline.
What if I got the first quarter's figures wrong?
Because updates are cumulative, you correct the figures in your records and the next quarterly update automatically includes the fix. You do not resubmit the earlier update.
Does my CRM count as MTD software?
No, and be wary of anything that suggests otherwise. Quarterly updates must be sent through HMRC-recognised MTD-compatible software, listed on gov.uk. A CRM sits alongside it, keeping the client and payment records that feed your bookkeeping accurate and complete.
I never received a letter from HMRC. Am I off the hook?
Not necessarily. HMRC wrote to taxpayers identified from 2024 to 2025 returns, but the legal obligation depends on your qualifying income, not on whether a letter arrived. If your gross self-employment and property income topped £50,000 in 2024 to 2025, check your position on gov.uk or ask your accountant now rather than after the deadline.