Tax tools for people who work for themselves

No. HMRC recognises 133 products for sole traders and landlords — 71 of them work with a spreadsheet you already keep, and 17 of those have a free version. We read the counts off HMRC's own finder and listed the free ones.

It is your gross self-employment and property income — turnover, not profit. Your salary, pensions and dividends do not count. Full table of what does and does not count towards the £50k, £30k and £20k thresholds, read from HMRC's guidance.

An update is category totals, not a profit figure. HMRC's legal direction fixes the list — 2 income + 13 expense for a sole trader, 4 + 9 for a UK landlord. We copied it out verbatim, with an open dataset you can quote.

Late filing is points, not fines: £200 only at 4 points, and no penalty at all on 2026/27 quarterly updates. Late payment is a separate 3%/4% schedule. We read it off HMRC and worked out the first date a penalty can actually land, wave by wave.

HMRC expects ~780,000 in April 2026, then ~970,000 in each of 2027 and 2028 — about 2.72 million in all, at an average £320 to set up and £110 a year. We read every figure off HMRC's two impact notes and added up the total HMRC never states.

Every figure we compile is published as JSON at a stable URL under CC BY 4.0 — the wave populations and costs, qualifying income, the quarterly update categories, the penalty regime, the software counts and how many updates you actually file a year. Take it, quote it, chart it. No key, no registration, no charge.