Are you eligible to take part in the Making Tax Digital (MTD) for Income Tax Pilot? 

At a glance

  • Taxpayers and their agents can sign up and participate in Making Tax Digital (MTD) for Income Tax pilot scheme (private beta). 
  • Making Tax Digital for Income Tax is currently voluntary. It will become mandatory from 6 April 2026 in phases based on your total annual income from self-employment or property. Taxpayers can either: 
    • Volunteer to use the service now (for self-employment and property income sources). 
    • Continue to send self-assessment tax returns as normal, and sign up to MTD for Income Tax when it becomes mandatory.
  • If the taxpayer has multiple income sources, you’ll need to sign up each one for MTD for Income Tax (it is not possible to sign up only one of multiple trades).
  • Signing up for the Pilot will mean that you will need to comply with the MTD record-keeping & reporting requirements. See, MTD: Toolkit for accountants
  • Only certain taxpayers are currently eligible to participate.
  • Taxpayers who have voluntarily signed up for the pilot can opt-out at any time during the testing phase using their HMRC online services account. Authorised agents can do this on behalf of their clients using their Agent Services Account (ASA). 

Are you eligible to take part?

  • Use our MTD pilot: eligibility checker 2024-25 and 2025-26 to check whether you can sign up to volunteer under the pilot scheme.

Recent changes.

  • After pausing the pilot in February 2023, HMRC expanded the MTD pilot (private beta) from April 2024. A larger but still restricted pool of sole traders and landlords were able to volunteer. 
  • The public beta testing is expected to open in April 2025.  
  • It was announced at Autumn Budget 2024 that self-employed businesses and landlords with a turnover above £20,000 will be mandated into MTD ITSA within the term of the current parliament.
  • Data have shown that in the three years since the pilot scheme began 1015 people have participated, of these, only 218 or approximately 21% are landlords with property income. The numbers have fallen dramatically since the first year, 2018-2019, from 877 to 26 in 2020-2021 and as of January 2022, only nine were participating.

 

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