HMRC Signed You Up for MTD? What to Do Before 7 Nov

If a letter from HMRC has just told you that you have been signed up for Making Tax Digital for Income Tax, you are not alone. From September 2026 HMRC is automatically signing up around 294,000 sole traders and landlords who should already be using the service but never registered. The selection is based on the income you reported on your 2024/25 Self Assessment return. If your qualifying income from self-employment and property was over £50,000, you are in.

The letter can feel alarming, especially if you have been keeping your books in a spreadsheet and assumed MTD was something to worry about later. This guide explains what an HMRC automatic MTD sign-up means, what you have already missed, and how to get your records in order before the next quarterly update is due on 7 November 2026.

Why HMRC is signing people up automatically

MTD for Income Tax became mandatory on 6 April 2026 for people with qualifying income above £50,000. HMRC wrote to everyone it believed was in scope. By the first filing deadline on 7 August, around 570,000 people had signed up and 436,000 had submitted their first quarterly update.

That leaves a large group who were required to join and didn't. Rather than wait for them, HMRC has started enrolling them in stages over the coming months. Being signed up automatically does not mean you have done anything wrong. It means the obligation that started in April now has your name on it.

What you have already missed (and what it costs)

The first quarterly update covered 6 April to 5 July 2026 and was due by 7 August. If you were signed up automatically, you almost certainly missed it.

The good news is that HMRC has confirmed there are no penalty points for late quarterly updates in the 2026/27 tax year. That relief has limits, though:

• Penalties still apply to a late tax return and to late payment of tax.
• You cannot complete your 2026/27 tax return until all of the year's quarterly updates have been submitted.

So the missed update doesn't cost you anything today, but it will block your return in January 2028 if you never deal with it. HMRC's advice is to submit it as soon as you can.

The dates that matter now

Under the standard update periods, the rest of the 2026/27 year looks like this:

• 6 April to 5 July 2026: due 7 August 2026 (overdue if you haven't sent it)
• 6 July to 5 October 2026: due 7 November 2026
• 6 October 2026 to 5 January 2027: due 7 February 2027
• 6 January to 5 April 2027: due 7 May 2027

The second quarter closes on 5 October, three weeks from now. The filing deadline is a month after that, but the records for the quarter are building up every day you wait.

Quarterly updates are running totals

This is the detail that makes catching up more manageable than it sounds. HMRC's service guide explains that quarterly updates are cumulative: each one reports your income and expenses from the start of the tax year to the end of that quarter, not just the latest three months.

In practice, your 7 November update will contain everything from 6 April to 5 October. If a figure in an earlier update was wrong, the corrected year-to-date total goes into the next one. You do not rewrite history each quarter.

What this doesn't do is make the first quarter disappear. Check in your software whether the 6 April to 5 July period still shows as an open obligation, and clear it before you move on. The year-to-date figures you need are largely the same either way.

A catch-up plan for the next three weeks

1. Check your HMRC online account

Confirm that you have been signed up, which income sources HMRC has recorded (self-employment, UK property, foreign property) and which quarterly obligations are showing. If you think you shouldn't be in scope, look at how qualifying income is worked out before assuming HMRC has made a mistake. Gross income counts, not profit.

If using software isn't reasonably practical for you because of age, disability, location or another reason, you can ask HMRC for an exemption. Do that now rather than after the next deadline.

2. Decide how you will submit

You have two routes. You can move to full accounting software that keeps your records and submits for you, or you can keep your spreadsheet and use bridging software to send the figures to HMRC. Both are allowed. Plenty of people who have kept books in Excel for years choose the second route because it doesn't change how they work.

If you keep the spreadsheet, the figures must reach HMRC through a digital link rather than being retyped. Our guide to digital links for spreadsheet users covers what counts.

3. Get April to October into shape

This is usually the part that takes the time. Six months of transactions need to be in one place, with nothing duplicated, and sorted into the expense categories HMRC uses. Bank exports, letting agent statements and a spreadsheet you update when you remember rarely line up neatly.

A practical order to work in:

1. Pull bank statements for 6 April to today into one file.
2. Remove transfers between your own accounts and any duplicate rows.
3. Split out personal spending if you use one account for both.
4. Assign every business transaction to an HMRC category.
5. Check the totals against your bank balance before anything is submitted.

4. Submit the overdue update, then the second quarter

Once the records are clean, clear the first quarter and send the second-quarter update well before 7 November. Leaving it to the final weekend is how the first deadline went wrong for a lot of people.

Don't let the next quarter pile up

The hardest part of being signed up late is not the paperwork. It's starting with six months of unsorted transactions instead of three. If you set aside an hour at the end of each quarter from now on, February and May are routine rather than another scramble.

If your records live in a spreadsheet and the problem is getting them clean enough to submit, TaxPrepUK turns Excel, CSV, OFX or QIF files into validated quarterly summaries you can import into whichever submission software you use. It runs entirely in your browser, so your figures never leave your device. It doesn't send anything to HMRC; it gets the data ready first.