The MTD Notebook · Signing up · 12 August 2026

How to sign up for Making Tax Digital for Income Tax

Being mandated for Making Tax Digital is not the same as being signed up for it. Mandation is automatic and decided by an old tax return; signing up is a thing you actively do, through an online service, before you can send a single quarterly update. This is who signs up, when, what HMRC asks for, and the one condition that trips people who think they are ready. Every point here is checked against GOV.UK and dated.

1. Who signs up — and who signs up whom

Making Tax Digital for Income Tax is mandatory for sole traders and landlords whose qualifying income is over a threshold — over £50,000 from 6 April 2026, over £30,000 from April 2027, over £20,000 from April 2028. Qualifying income is your total income from self-employment and property, before expenses — turnover, not profit — taken from the tax return you filed in the previous year. If you are not sure which side of the line you fall, work it out before you do anything else.

Being over the threshold does not sign you up. HMRC does not do it for you. There are two separate online services, and which one applies depends on who is filing:

• If you file your own return, you use the "Sign up for Making Tax Digital for Income Tax" service on GOV.UK.
• If an accountant or bookkeeper files for you, they can sign you up through the separate agent service instead — you do not both do it. We cover the practice side of that in the post for agents and bookkeepers.

2. When to sign up, and the two conditions

GOV.UK's instruction to the first wave is blunt: if you need to use MTD for the 2026 to 2027 tax year, you should sign up now. There is no separate "start date" you wait for once you are in scope — the obligation began on 6 April 2026, and signing up is how you switch it on.

But you cannot sign up on a blank slate. To use the service you must meet both of these:

• you are registered for Self Assessment; and
• you have submitted a tax return in the last two years.

That second condition is the one that catches people out. Someone in their first or second year of self-employment — exactly the person most likely to be reading this early — may not yet have a filed return behind them, and until they do, the sign-up service has nothing to check them against. New businesses come into MTD later anyway, but if you are trying to volunteer ahead of time, a filed return is the prerequisite nobody mentions.

3. Signing up early, on purpose

You do not have to wait to be mandated. GOV.UK lets you sign up voluntarily before your own start date — for the current tax year or the next one — specifically to get ready while the stakes are low. If your start date is April 2027, you can volunteer now and treat 2026/27 as a dry run.

There is one catch worth stating plainly, because it surprises volunteers: signing up applies to the whole tax year, not from the day you click. If you volunteer partway through the year, you will need compatible software to send any quarterly updates already missed for the year so far — you are opting into the quarters that have already passed, not just the ones ahead. It is still worth doing; it is just not free of homework. Whether an easement or a genuine exemption might apply first is worth checking — see who can actually opt out.

4. Two things to settle before you start

The sign-up itself takes minutes. What takes longer is the two things GOV.UK tells you to sort out first, and both are easy to skip:

• Check you are not exempt. If you qualify for an exemption you do not have to sign up at all, and there is no point volunteering into an obligation you are excused from. Qualifying income of £20,000 or less is an automatic exemption; digital exclusion has to be applied for. The exemptions post has the detail.
• Have compatible software lined up. You cannot send a quarterly update from the GOV.UK website — updates go through software that works with MTD, and you should have it chosen before you sign up so your first deadline is not a scramble. It does not have to be an expensive all-in-one: a spreadsheet joined to bridging software is compliant, which we set out in the records post.

5. What HMRC actually asks for

The sign-up service asks you to confirm your self-employment and property income — including any source that has ceased since your last return. (If every source has ceased, you tell HMRC separately before the next tax year starts, and they confirm in writing that you do not need MTD.) Beyond that, the checklist is short:

If you have more than one trade or more than one property business, check each one is listed in the service and add any that are missing — MTD treats all your self-employment as one thing and all your property as another, but each source still has to be present.

6. How the sign-up itself works

You sign in with the same Government Gateway user ID and password you got when you registered for Self Assessment — not a new account. If HMRC wants extra proof it is you, it will ask you to either match a photo of your face to your passport or driving licence through an app, or answer questions from records it already holds — a P60, a recent payslip, a passport, a credit file. Once you are through, HMRC confirms your eligibility from what you entered and you are signed up for the tax year you chose.

From that point the clock is real: your quarterly updates are due on the fixed dates — 7 August, 7 November, 7 February and 7 May — regardless of when in the year you signed up.

7. What signing up does not change

Two obligations survive the switch, and both are easy to lose track of in the noise about "going digital":

• You still file the Self Assessment return for the year before you start. Signing up for MTD from April 2026 does not cancel your 2025–26 return, still due 31 January 2027 in the ordinary way. MTD is how you report the new year, not a line drawn through the old one.
• The tax return itself does not disappear. Quarterly updates are summaries; a year-end return — the final declaration — still pulls in everything else (employment, dividends, interest, gains) and works out your bill. If you thought MTD replaced the return, start with this post.

One reassurance on the penalties, because the timing is genuinely favourable for the first wave: HMRC will not apply penalty points for late quarterly updates in 2026/27. Penalties still apply for a late tax return and for paying your tax late — but the quarterly filing itself has a soft first year, which is exactly why signing up now to practise costs you nothing but effort.