From September 2026, HMRC starts signing sole traders and landlords up to Making Tax Digital for Income Tax automatically if they should already be using it and haven’t registered. If that’s you, don’t wait for the letter — register yourself, now, before HMRC does it for you.
The rollout is happening in stages, so not everyone over the £50,000 income threshold will hear from HMRC this month. That’s exactly the trap: it’s easy to read “in stages” as “not yet my problem” and keep putting it off. But the two things you lose by waiting aren’t small. You lose the choice of software — sign up yourself and you can compare the HMRC-recognised options and pick one that actually suits how you work; get auto-enrolled and you’re choosing under time pressure, once the requirement is already live. And you lose the choice of timing — setting up digital records in a quiet week is a very different experience to doing it the week a letter arrives.
The counterargument is the penalty holiday: no points are being issued for late quarterly updates in 2026–27, so there’s technically no rush. That’s true, but it’s a one-year grace period, not a reason to relax — the points-based system with £200 fixed penalties lands from April 2027, and by then the threshold drops to £30,000, pulling in a wider group of businesses who’ll all be trying to sort this out at once.
If your qualifying income from self-employment or property is over £50,000 and you haven’t signed up, do it on GOV.UK this week rather than waiting to see if a letter turns up. Have you registered yet, or are you planning to wait it out?
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