Making Tax Digital Is Live: What 7 November Means, and the April Date That Matters More

Making Tax Digital for Income Tax stopped being a consultation document this April. If you are a sole trader or a landlord and your gross self-employment and rental income topped £50,000 two years ago, you are already in it, whether or not anyone told you.

The next quarterly update is due on 7 November. It carries no penalty. The date that will cost people is 6 April 2027, when the threshold drops to £30,000 and the exemption that currently covers non-residents runs out.

Who is actually in scope, and from when

Since 6 April 2026 you must keep digital records and send HMRC a quarterly update if all three of these are true: you are a sole trader or a landlord registered for Self Assessment, you have income from self-employment or property, and your qualifying income was over the threshold for the relevant year.

HMRC worked out who was in scope by reading the return you filed the year before. For the April 2026 start it looked at your 2024 to 2025 return. From September 2026 it began signing people up automatically where its records showed qualifying income over £50,000, so some people are enrolled without having volunteered.

Two more thresholds follow:

• £30,000 of qualifying income in 2025 to 2026 brings you in from 6 April 2027.
• £20,000 in 2026 to 2027 brings you in from 6 April 2028.

Partnerships are not in yet. HMRC says it will set out that timeline later.

The number that catches people is gross, not profit

Qualifying income is your total income from self-employment and property before expenses. HMRC's own word for it is turnover.

That one word does most of the damage. A profitable business and a loss-making one with the same takings are treated identically.

A landlord with £25,000 of rent and a side business turning over £27,000 has £52,000 of qualifying income. They are in scope in a year when neither made a penny of profit.

What does not count toward it: employment income taxed through PAYE, your share of partnership profit, dividends including those from your own company, the State Pension, private pensions, income from UK REITs or PAIFs, qualifying care relief, transition profits from basis period reform, and a one-off UK land transaction falling inside a single tax year.

Jointly owned property counts at your share. A property generating £50,000 of rent held in equal shares is £25,000 each, not £50,000 each.

7 November, and why it is a deadline without a penalty

For the 2026 to 2027 tax year the quarterly updates are due on 7 August, 7 November, 7 February and 7 May. The second one lands on 7 November 2026.

HMRC's guidance is unambiguous about the consequence of missing it: there are no penalties for missing a quarterly update deadline for the 2026 to 2027 tax year. Penalty points for quarterly updates begin with the tax year after that.

So why bother? Because the updates are a gate, not a filing. You cannot submit your tax return until the year's quarterly updates have been sent. Skipping November does not save you the work, it moves it to January and stacks it behind the one deadline that does carry a penalty.

One detail that surprises people: if you had no income and no expenses in a period, you still have to send the update. A nil update is a submission, not an exemption.

What does carry a penalty

Late submission penalties are points based. One point per missed deadline, a threshold of four points, and £200 when you hit it, then £200 for every further miss. The 2026 to 2027 relief covers quarterly updates only. Tax return deadlines and payment deadlines are not in it.

Late payment, for the 2026 to 2027 tax year:

• Up to 15 days late: no penalty.
• 16 to 30 days late: 3% of the tax owed at day 15.
• 31 days or more: 3% of the tax owed at day 15, plus 3% of the tax owed at day 30, plus an annual rate of 10% on what is still outstanding, charged daily from day 31 until you pay, for up to two years.

In your first year under the new penalties you get 30 days from the due date to pay in full or agree a payment plan with HMRC before penalties start. After that first year it is 15 days. Late payment interest runs from day one either way, and payments on account sit outside the late payment penalty regime entirely.

From 2027 to 2028 those 3% figures become 4%.

The part the expat coverage has missed

If you are not a UK tax resident, only your UK income counts toward qualifying income: UK property income, plus any self-employment income you declared on a UK Self Assessment return. Foreign property and foreign self-employment income that never appeared on a UK return are outside it. A Spanish resident with a UK rental and a Spanish sole trader business counts only the UK rent.

That is the easy half. The harder half is a date.

For 2026 to 2027 there is an exemption for anyone whose 2024 to 2025 return included the SA109 residence page, which covers being non-resident in that tax year, including those entitled to claim personal allowances under the terms of a double taxation agreement. If that is you, you are out this year, automatically, without applying.

HMRC is explicit about what happens next. If your qualifying income is more than £30,000, you will need to use Making Tax Digital for Income Tax from the 2027 to 2028 tax year onwards.

The non-resident exemption is a year of grace, not a carve-out. A non-resident landlord with more than £30,000 of UK rent is in from 6 April 2027.

If you expect to claim the SA109 for 2025 to 2026 or 2026 to 2027 but did not include it in your 2024 to 2025 return, the exemption is not automatic. You have to apply for it.

The records, where the rules are softer than the headline

The digital record requirement sounds heavier than it is. You need the amount, the date and a category for each item of self-employment or property income and expense. Beyond that, several reliefs exist and are easy to miss:

• If your turnover from a source is under £90,000, a sole trader only needs to record whether a transaction is income or an expense, without categorising further. Residential landlords still have to flag a restricted finance cost.
• Retailers can record daily gross takings instead of individual sales.
• Landlords with jointly let property only need records for their own share, and can leave jointly let expenses out of the quarterly updates and add them before the return.
• If you are confident you will use a simplified expenses scheme, you do not need digital records of the actual expenses.
• Income below the trading or property allowance that you did not declare on your previous return needs no digital record at all.

Keep the records for five years after the 31 January deadline for that tax year.

What Moola deliberately does not do

Moola is not Making Tax Digital software. It is not on HMRC's compatible software list, it will not send your quarterly updates, and it cannot file your return. If you are in scope, you need recognised MTD software or an accountant who has it. We would rather say that plainly than let anyone discover it on 6 November.

What Moola does is the part that bookkeeping software leaves alone. It reads the returns you have already filed, UK, German, wherever you pay, and shows what each year did to the thirty year projection rather than just what you owed. The £52,000 that pulls you into MTD is a compliance fact. Whether your plan survives it is a different question, and it is the one we built for.

The dates, in order

• 31 October 2026, 11:59pm. Paper Self Assessment return for 2025 to 2026.
• 7 November 2026. Second quarterly update for 2026 to 2027. No penalty this year, but it gates your return.
• 30 December 2026. Last date to file online if you want the bill collected through your tax code.
• 31 January 2027. Online return for 2025 to 2026, and the payment deadline.
• 6 April 2027. The £30,000 threshold starts, and the SA109 non-resident exemption ends.
• 6 April 2028. The £20,000 threshold starts.

Every figure here comes from HMRC's own guidance on GOV.UK, checked on 23 October 2026. The rules have moved more than once, so check the date on anything else you read.