UK · Verified 31 July 2026 · Not tax advice

MTD quarterly updates: what you actually submit

Four times a tax year, for each business you run, you send HMRC the totals of your income and your expenses for that quarter. That is it. It is not a mini tax return, it does not include your reliefs, and it does not calculate your tax bill. Then, once a year, a final declaration pulls everything together and replaces the Self Assessment return you file today.

What goes in an update, in plain English No invented filing dates or penalty figures Separate sources explained properly

Last verified 31 July 2026. Promotions change roughly monthly — confirm before you subscribe.

The short version

A quarterly update is a summary submission sent from HMRC-recognised software containing the total income and total allowable expenses for one business source, for one three-month period. You send four of them per tax year, per source, and then one final declaration that adds the reliefs, allowances and adjustments and finalises your tax position for the year.

Three consequences follow, and they are the three things people misread.

It is totals, not transactions. You are not uploading every invoice to HMRC. Your software holds the detail; the update carries the summary.
Each business source gets its own updates. Self-employment is one source. Property is another. Run a trade and let a flat and you are sending two sets of four.
Nothing clever happens until the final declaration. Capital allowances, reliefs, private-use adjustments, other income — all of that belongs to the year-end submission, not to the quarters.

Not tax advice — confirm with HMRC or your accountant

Fizoral is an independent comparison site, not an accountancy practice. Everything on this page is general information for UK sole traders and landlords, verified on 31 July 2026. Nothing here is tax advice and nothing on it creates a professional relationship. The Making Tax Digital timetable has already been delayed and re-scoped more than once, so confirm your own position before you act. HMRC’s own guidance is at gov.uk: Using Making Tax Digital for Income Tax.

What a quarterly update actually is

A quarterly update is a cumulative summary of the digital records you are already required to keep, pushed to HMRC from software HMRC recognises. It is a reporting step, not an accounting step — if your bookkeeping is up to date, submitting one is close to a single click.

The mental model that trips people up is the tax return. A Self Assessment return is a finished document: it contains your income, your reliefs, your adjustments and a calculation. A quarterly update is none of those things. It is closer to a meter reading — a snapshot of where your books stand at the end of a three-month period.

Because it is a summary of your records, the real work under Making Tax Digital for Income Tax is not the submitting. It is the digital record-keeping that sits underneath it. People who already reconcile their bank feed weekly barely notice the change. People who currently do a shoebox of receipts every January feel it hard, because the shoebox approach does not survive a quarterly rhythm.

The bit worth internalising

Under Self Assessment you can be twelve months behind and still comply. Under MTD you cannot. The obligation is not really “file four times a year” — it is “keep books that are never more than three months stale”. That is the actual change to your life.

What you submit: totals of income and expenses, per business source

Each quarterly update contains, for one business source and one quarter, the total income and the total allowable expenses, broken down into the expense categories your software presents. Nothing else is required in the quarterly submission itself.

Your software will present those categories in whatever shape it uses — the standard headings you already recognise from a Self Assessment return, such as cost of goods, staff costs, premises, travel, professional fees, and so on. You are not being asked to invent a new chart of accounts. You are being asked to categorise as you go, rather than in a panic the following winter.

What belongs in a quarterly update and what belongs in the final declaration
Item	Quarterly update	Final declaration
Total income for the source	Yes	Carried through
Total allowable expenses, by category	Yes	Carried through
Capital allowances	No	Yes
Private-use adjustments	No	Yes
Reliefs and allowances	No	Yes
Accounting adjustments and year-end corrections	No	Yes
Income outside MTD (employment, dividends, savings, pensions)	No	Yes
Your final taxable position for the year	No	Yes

Source: SITE-SPEC §3 verified facts plus HMRC’s published description of the MTD for Income Tax obligation. Where an exact submission field or deadline is not verified here, get it from gov.uk or your accountant.

Self-employment and property are separate business sources

Self-employment income and property income are reported as separate sources, each with its own set of four quarterly updates. Running a trade and letting a property does not mean one combined update — it means two streams of reporting that only meet at the final declaration.

This matters for two reasons, and they pull in opposite directions.

For the threshold, you add them together. Qualifying income is gross self-employment income plus gross property income. A plumber turning over £24,000 who also lets a flat for £9,000 has £33,000 of qualifying income and is over the £30,000 line. Check where you fall.
For the reporting, you keep them apart. Once you are in, those two activities are reported separately. Do not co-mingle them in one bank account or one spreadsheet tab and hope to split them later.

If you let property, the separation has extra edges — UK and overseas property are not the same source either. That is covered in full on MTD for landlords.

Practical consequence

If you run a trade and let property, get a separate bank account for the property before you are mandated. It is the single cheapest thing you can do to make quarterly reporting boring, and every accountant will tell you the same. Doing it retrospectively across a year of mixed transactions is where the cost is.

Reliefs and adjustments belong to the final declaration

The final declaration is the once-a-year submission that finishes the job: it takes your four quarters of totals, adds capital allowances, reliefs, adjustments and any income that sits outside MTD, and confirms the whole picture. It is the submission that replaces the Self Assessment return you file today.

So if you have been reading about MTD and worrying that you now have to think about capital allowances four times a year, you can stop. You do not. The quarters are deliberately dumb. Everything requiring judgement — how much of the car is business use, which purchase is capital and which is repair, whether a relief applies — happens once, at the end, exactly as it does now.

Two things about the final declaration are worth planning for:

It covers your whole tax position, not just the MTD bits. Employment income, dividends, savings interest and pensions do not appear in quarterly updates, but they still have to be declared. The final declaration is where they land.
It is still the point at which an accountant earns their fee. MTD moves bookkeeping effort forward into the year. It does not remove the year-end judgement calls. If you use an accountant today, you will very likely still want one.

What we will not do is print a date for it. See below.

When the four updates fall — get the dates from HMRC

We are not printing quarterly filing deadline dates or penalty figures on this page. We publish figures we have verified, and we have verified the thresholds and mandation dates but not the filing calendar. Get the quarterly periods, their filing dates and the penalty regime from gov.uk or from your accountant.

That is a deliberate choice and it costs us traffic. Plenty of competing pages will give you a confident table of dates. Some of those tables are correct; some were written before the last re-scoping and have never been revisited. You have no way to tell which is which by looking, and neither, honestly, would you have with ours.

What we can tell you without hedging, because it comes straight from the verified fact table:

There are four quarterly updates per tax year, plus a final declaration.
Your start date depends on your qualifying income: over £50,000 started 6 April 2026; over £30,000 starts 6 April 2027; over £20,000 is planned for April 2028.
Combined gross self-employment and property income of £20,000 or less keeps you outside MTD for Income Tax entirely.

The full timetable, with the tax year each threshold is measured against, is on the MTD deadlines page.

On penalties specifically

MTD for Income Tax sits within a points-based late-submission regime. We are not going to quote you a points total or a pound figure, because an out-of-date penalty number is worse than no number. HMRC publishes the current position. If you are already late, the useful move is not more reading — it is a conversation with an accountant this week.

What this means for how you keep your books

Quarterly updates are easy if your records are current and painful if they are not, so the thing to fix before your start date is the bookkeeping rhythm, not the submission mechanics. Pick a tool you will actually open every month, get a full clean quarter through it, and the submissions look after themselves.

Three routes, in the order most people should consider them:

Keep proper digital records in software. Bank feed in, categorise as you go, submit from the same place. This is the low-friction option and it is free for a lot of people — FreeAgent is free permanently with a NatWest, RBS, Ulster Bank or Mettle account, and Sage has a genuinely free sole trader tier.
Stay on a spreadsheet plus bridging software. Legitimate, and we explain the real trade-offs on can I keep using a spreadsheet under MTD?
Hand it to an accountant. Costs more than software, buys back the year-end judgement calls as well as the filing.

Whichever you choose, MTD compatibility is not a reason to pay more. Xero, QuickBooks, FreeAgent and Sage are all on HMRC’s recognised list, along with cheaper options. It is table stakes, not a feature. Compare on 24-month cost and on whether you will actually use the thing.

Questions people actually ask

Quarterly updates: common questions

Short answers. Where the honest answer is “check with HMRC”, that is what it says.

What is in a quarterly update?

Totals. For each business source you report the total income and the total allowable expenses for the quarter, in the expense categories your software uses. It is a summary of your digital records, not a mini tax return, and it does not include reliefs, allowances or accounting adjustments.

How many quarterly updates are there in a tax year?

Four per tax year, per business source, plus one final declaration at the end of the year. If you are a sole trader who also lets a property, that is two sets of four updates and one final declaration covering everything.

Do quarterly updates replace the Self Assessment tax return?

For people inside Making Tax Digital for Income Tax, yes. Four quarterly updates plus a final declaration take the place of the single annual return. If you are outside the thresholds, Self Assessment carries on exactly as before.

Do I pay tax four times a year under Making Tax Digital?

A quarterly update is an information return, not a payment demand. It does not by itself change when your tax is due. Payment dates and any payment-on-account arrangements are set by HMRC, so check gov.uk or ask your accountant rather than assuming your payment dates have moved.

What happens if a quarterly update is wrong?

Quarterly updates are cumulative summaries, and the position is squared up at the final declaration, so an imperfect quarter is not fatal. HMRC publishes the correction mechanism and the penalty regime that applies; we do not reproduce penalty figures here because we have not verified them. Check gov.uk or ask your accountant.

Are the quarterly deadlines the same for everyone?

We do not publish the filing deadline dates on this page, because we have not verified them to the standard we hold ourselves to. HMRC publishes the quarterly periods and their filing dates on gov.uk. Get them from there, then put them in your calendar.

Where to go next

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