Making Tax Digital for Income Tax is live, and quarterly filing has begun

After years of postponements, Making Tax Digital for Income Tax finally went live on 6 April 2026. Sole traders and landlords with qualifying income over £50,000 must now keep digital records and send HMRC quarterly updates through recognised software. The first of those updates covered the quarter to 5 July, with a filing deadline of 7 August.

If that comes as news, you're not alone. Every previous MTD start date moved, and plenty of people assumed this one would too. It didn't.

What's actually changed

For those in scope, the annual tax return ritual has become a quarterly rhythm:

• Digital records of income and expenses, kept in software rather than on paper or in ad-hoc spreadsheets.
• Quarterly updates submitted to HMRC through MTD-recognised software, with an estimated tax position after each one.
• One annual bill, as before. The payment deadline remains 31 January. What's changed is how often HMRC hears from you, not when you pay.

And this is only phase one. The threshold drops to £30,000 in April 2027 and £20,000 in April 2028, each step pulling in hundreds of thousands more taxpayers, and putting more pressure on the accountants and bookkeepers who serve them.

The real problem isn't the software, it's the data

Plenty of coverage has focused on choosing an MTD-compatible product. In our experience, that's the easy part. The hard part is what feeds it.

Quarterly filing punishes exactly the habits annual filing tolerated: the shoebox of receipts, the spreadsheet reconciled once a year, the rental income that lives in a bank statement until January. If the data isn't captured digitally as it happens, someone now gets to do the January scramble four times a year.

For accountants and bureaus, this is a workflow problem multiplied across every client. The practices coping best are the ones treating MTD as a data plumbing exercise: bank feeds connected, invoicing systems talking to the books, client records flowing in automatically rather than arriving in carrier bags.

Where we fit

Connecting systems so data moves without re-keying is most of what we do, from linking line-of-business systems into accounting platforms to automating the handoffs between practice tools. If MTD has exposed a gap where a spreadsheet used to be, we can help you close it.