What Making Tax Digital for Income Tax means for a landlord

Making Tax Digital for Income Tax has been live since 6 April 2026 for landlords whose gross rental income is above £50,000 a year. If it applies to you, you keep digital records and send HMRC a quarterly update through compatible software, instead of filing one Self Assessment return after the tax year ends. The threshold drops to £30,000 from April 2027, and to £20,000 from April 2028 — which is where this stops being a rule for large portfolios and starts catching landlords who never thought of themselves as digital-first.

Who the threshold catches, and when

The £50,000 figure is gross rent, not profit — income before any expenses come off it. That distinction matters, because a landlord with a healthy portfolio and a thin margin can still be well over the threshold.

As a sense of scale: four properties let at £1,100 a month each come to £52,800 a year in gross rent — already over the £50,000 threshold in place now, and comfortably over the £20,000 threshold due in 2028. That is arithmetic worth checking against your own numbers rather than a claim about what anyone owes; it just shows how close the lower thresholds already are for an ordinary small portfolio.

It also only applies to individual landlords assessed under Income Tax. A landlord who lets through a limited company is taxed differently, and that distinction sits outside this rule. If you are not sure which side of that line you are on, that is a question for an accountant rather than a guess.

Why the calendar changes, not just the paperwork

A once-a-year Self Assessment return tolerates a year of loose record-keeping, because everything gets reconstructed in one pass before the deadline. Quarterly updates do not work that way — the first quarter of the tax year closes on 5 July, and its figures have to be in order shortly after that, not at some point before the following January. The practical change is less about the software you file with and more about when the work happens: record-keeping through the year rather than a scramble each spring.

That is also where a self-managing landlord feels this differently from one who pays an agent. The agent's own accounts do not do it for you — your rental income is still yours to report — but if you have been managing rent collection through bank transfers and a folder of PDFs, quarterly cycles are the point at which "I'll sort it out later" stops being an option four times a year instead of one.

What the rule actually asks for

The quarterly-update mechanics, the exact deadlines, and how the tax year is finalised are set out in full on GOV.UK — worth reading end to end if a threshold applies to you, because getting the detail from a summary is exactly the kind of thing that goes wrong.

What is settled and worth knowing in advance: records need to be digital, and moving a figure from where it was generated to where it gets reported should not mean retyping it by hand into another system. HMRC calls that a digital link, and a CSV export satisfies it.

What that means for the records you already have

Tenarize's rent report exports as a PDF or a CSV, with UK tax-year presets built in, pulled from the record of what was actually charged and paid on each tenancy rather than reconstructed from memory at the end of the year. The maintenance expense report is a zip — an itemised PDF, the supplier invoices themselves, and optionally a CSV — and it opens on the current UK tax year by default.

If you use FreeAgent, the connection goes further: rent, late-payment interest and maintenance costs post across every night, split by property, with the supplier's invoice attached to a maintenance bill where you have uploaded one. It is included at every pricing tier.

It never marks anything as paid in FreeAgent. Rent is a direct charge on your own Stripe account, so your bank feed already shows the money — you still reconcile it yourself. A deposit is never sent across either, only the part you actually keep at the end of a tenancy, and only once you have mapped it to a category.

FreeAgent is currently the only accounting software Tenarize connects to directly — nothing for Xero or QuickBooks. If that is what you or your accountant uses, the CSV export is the way across in the meantime.

Tenarize is software, not an accountant. This is general information about Making Tax Digital, not tax advice for your situation — talk to an accountant about whether and when it applies to you.

Where to check this yourself

• Find out if and when you need to use Making Tax Digital for Income Tax — GOV.UK, for the thresholds, the dates, what counts as qualifying income and how a quarterly update actually works
• Does Tenarize help with Making Tax Digital for Income Tax? — the help centre version of this post
• Can I get a rent statement for my accountant? and Can I export my property spend for a tax return? — what each export contains

Tenarize is £15 a month for one to five properties, with the first month free. The help centre is free to read either way.