If you are in business as a sole trader or landlord and your turnover from both is £50000 or more, you will have to start making quarterly updates to HMRC from April 2026, less than a year away.

Quarterly updates will be required for standard quarters, irrespective of your accounting period.

The standard quarters are:

• 6 April to 5 July
• 6 July to 5 October
• 6 October to 5 January
• 6 January to 5 April

Businesses will be able to elect to report for calendar quarters:

• 1 April to 30 June
• 1 July to 30 September
• 1 October to 31 December
• 1 January to 31 March

The deadlines for quarterly updates will be 7 August, 7 November, 7 February and 7 May following the end of the relevant quarter, whichever quarter you use, calendar or tax year.

Updates may be submitted more frequently and can be submitted up to 10 days early, where the information for the quarter is known to be complete.

The information to be included in a quarterly update will require totals of the amounts of income and expenses for set categories. The information will be a simple, unadjusted summary of your accounting records. Nobody is going to check them, and there will be no penalties for any inaccuracies.

These categories are broadly the same as those that are currently used for the full self-employment and property sections of your tax return.

If your turnover is below the VAT threshold, you can use ‘three-line accounts’, meaning only income, expenses and profit/loss need to be reported. This is just the same as you can for your tax return at the moment.

Separate quarterly updates will be required for each business. For example, if you operate as a sole trader who also has a UK property business, you would need to submit eight quarterly updates a year.

Income from UK property and income from overseas property are each treated as a single business.

If you have more than one self-employed trade, a separate update is required for each trade.

The quarterly updates are cumulative year to date figures and, in most cases, corrections will be made automatically when the next update is submitted.