MTD: Income Tax Pilot Tool

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

UPDATE: HMRC has re-opened the pilot to new participants.

At a glance

Taxpayers and their agents can sign up and participate in a voluntary Making Tax Digital (MTD) for Income Tax pilot scheme (private beta).
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 allow your software to transmit your accounting data to HMRC every three months.
Only certain taxpayers are currently eligible to participate.

Are you eligible to take part?

Use our MTD pilot: eligibility checker to check whether you can sign up to volunteer under the pilot scheme.

Recent changes

After pausing the pilot in February 2023, HMRC have now confirmed that the MTD pilot (private beta) will expand from April 2024. A larger but still restricted pool of sole traders and landlords will be able to volunteer.
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.
Most sole traders and landlords will be able to volunteer for the MTD pilot from April 2025.
The Government is keeping plans for extending MTD to sole traders and landlords with income below £30,000 under review.
Data has show 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.

MTD pilot: eligibility checker


Are your personal details up to date with HMRC?	No →	You cannot join the MTD pilot as you do not fulfil the current criteria.
Yes ↓
Are you UK resident?	No →
Yes ↓
Do you have a National Insurance number?	No →
Yes ↓
Are you Registered for Self-Assessment?	No →
Yes ↓
Have you submitted at least one Self-Assessment tax return?	No →
Yes ↓
Are your tax returns and tax records up to date?	No →
Yes ↓
Does your business/both your businesses have a 5 April year-end? Or Does your business or your businesses have an accounting period that runs from 1 April to 31 March? and does your software support this? (Note 1)	No →
Yes ↓
Was one or more of the following included within the last tax return?: A Sole Trader income or Property income, (UK or foreign)	No →
Yes ↓
Do you have to report any of the following other types of taxable receipts from: A trust A jointly owned property A furnished holiday let	Yes →
No ↓
Do you claim Married Couple's Allowance and/or Blind Person's Allowance	Yes →
No ↓
Do you have any income tax charges, e.g. HICBC, pension charges?	Yes →
No ↓
Do you have a payment arrangement in place?	Yes →
No ↓
Are you in a partnership?	Yes →
No ↓
Are you currently, or going to be, insolvent or bankrupt?	Yes →
No ↓
Are you a MP, Minister of religion, Lloyds underwriter, foster carer or in a shared lives scheme?	Yes →
No ↓
Are you subject to a compliance enquiry?	Yes →
No ↓
Are you using ‘averaging’ or other arrangements because your profits vary between years — for example, because you’re a farmer, writer or artist	Yes →
No ↓
Are you signing up on behalf of someone else (unless you’re an agent) — this includes but is not limited to if you’re: an insolvency practitioner a nominee a solicitor	Yes →
No ↓
Are you using, or going to start using functional compatible software that will allow you to report quarterly to HMRC?	No →
Yes↓
Is the taxable turnover from your business/businesses above £30,000?	No →	Your business may not be big enough to be mandated into MTD. MTD will apply to your first accounting period that starts on or after 6 April 2026, if the taxable turnover from your self-employed business or income from property is above £50,000, or 6 April 2027, if your taxable turnover from your self-employed business or income from property is above £30,000. If you know that your income is less than £30,000, and is unlikely to exceed that level then MTD is voluntary for you. You can sign up to the Pilot if you wish to.
Yes↓
Congratulations! You have met the basic qualifying conditions to be able to join the MTD for Income Tax pilot. See the next tab.

Note 1: HMRC's current system has a default accounting period of 5th April. If the taxpayer has a different accounting period i.e. 31 March:

An election must be made before the first quarterly update is submitted to use the 31 March.
Adjustments must be made to add income and expenses from 1 April to 5 April.

HMRC's MTD Pilot

This is a test pilot and it may well be that aspects of the service will change.
You must use commercial software: HMRC will not provide any free software. For information about the software available please see Compare software for Making Tax Digital for Income Tax.
After pausing the pilot in February 2023, HMRC have now confirmed that the MTD testing pilot will expand from 22 April 2024. A larger but still restricted pool of self-employed taxpayers and landlords will be able to volunteer.
Making Tax Digital for Income Tax is currently voluntary. Eligible taxpayers who wish to participate in MTD for 2024/25 should sign up for the MTD pilot between April and June 2024.
During the testing phase, HMRC will not issue any late submission penalties for quarterly updates.
If taxpayers sign up part way through the tax year they can either:
- Catch up with their digital record-keeping and quarterly updates when they sign up for MTD, or
- Send nil returns for the update periods that ended before they signed up and resend updates once all of the digital records have been created.
Taxpayers have until their tax return is submitted to catch up on digital records. The deadline for this is 31 January following the end of the tax year.

Before signing up you should

Check that you are eligible (Use our tool, see tab MTD pilot: eligibility checker).
Choose the Software that you want to use.
Sign up to MTD with HMRC.
Authorise your compatible software, by entering your Government Gateway ID and password.

There are two routes to sign up for the MTD pilot:

Individuals may sign up directly, See Sign up voluntarily for Making Tax Digital for Income Tax
Agents can sign up clients on their clients' behalf. See, Sign up your client for Making Tax Digital for Income Tax

Agents may sign clients up to voluntarily MTD for Income Tax, using their Agent Services Account (ASA). This differs from the HMRC Online Services for Agents account that you may already have.

Client authorisation is obtained either by:
- Copying your existing authorisation for Self Assessment from your HMRC Online Services for Agents account to your ASA.
- Following the steps in the ASA and asking your client to authorise you.
Once you have an authorisation, you will also need, your Government Gateway user ID and password from signing up for an ASA. For your client, you will need their:
- Full name.
- Date of birth.
- National Insurance number.
- Business name.
- Business address.
- Nature of their business.
- Business start date.
- Email address.
- Unique Taxpayer Reference (UTR).
- Accounting period.
- Accounting type such as cash or standard accounting.

Once you have everything that you need, you can sign them up via Gov.uk

A bulk sign-up facility for MTD ITSA will not be possible.

Agents were to be able to sign up mandated MTD ITSA customers from 6 April 2022.
- This did not activate MTD obligations but allowed agents to spread the load of sign-up work.
- This will only come into effect from 6 April 2026. Any sign-ups made before that date would be for the active pilot.

Contacting HMRC

After signing up for MTD for Income Tax, HMRC will issue with a welcome letter that contains a direct phone number for the dedicated Customer Support Team.

The dedicated team can help taxpayers and thier agents with:

income and expenses to include in your submissions
payments and refunds
filing dates
penalties
reporting of errors in calculations, statements, and payments resulting from submissions
Self Assessment and Capital Gains including years before Making Tax Digital for Income Tax
PAYE including tax codes

Taxpayers can access the new MTD for Income Tax through thier existing HMRC online services account. See, Personal Tax Account

The Pilot is not recommended for

Taxpayers with a poor understanding of IT.
Taxpayers with a poor understanding of bookkeeping.
Those who do not have a reliable broadband connection.
Those who will not be available at least on a quarterly basis to send in data.
VAT registered traders.
Traders and landlords with a low income.

Under the MTD for Income Tax pilot, taxpayers cannot carry back losses, change their accounting period, or switch between cash and accruals. You should consider this when deciding whether to volunteer for the pilot (private beta).

Ask your adviser if you decide to take part in this pilot and wish to delegate to them.

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