What you need before you start
- You must be registered for Self Assessment
- You must have submitted a tax return in the last 2 years
- Your National Insurance number
- Your sign-in details for HMRC online services, the ones you use for Self Assessment
HMRC checks that you are eligible from the details you provide, and you may be asked to pass an identification check. If you use an accountant, they sign clients up a different way, through their agent services account, and can send you an authorisation request.
You sign up each income source
If you have more than one business, you sign each one up separately. All of your UK properties are treated as one UK property business and all of your foreign properties as one foreign property business, so those are one sign-up each.
The sign-up service does not ask about your other income. Dividends, savings interest, pensions and a partnership share are added in your compatible software before you submit your tax return, not on the sign-up form.
Volunteering before you have to
You can sign up before you are required to, for either the current tax year or the next one, and get the first year out of the way while the stakes are low. If you sign up partway through a tax year you will need software that works with Making Tax Digital for Income Tax to send the quarterly updates you have missed for the year so far.
You still have to submit the Self Assessment tax return for the tax year before you start using the new service.
If HMRC signs you up first
From September 2026 HMRC began signing up anyone who needs to use Making Tax Digital for Income Tax for 2026-27 and has not signed themselves up. Those sign-ups happen in stages, and HMRC will contact you once it has done it.
When HMRC signs you up it uses only the information it already holds, which may not include changes to your circumstances since your last return. If HMRC has signed you up, check the details it holds about your income sources, add anything new, and tell it about anything that has stopped.
The three steps that follow sign-up
- Authorise your software so it is connected to HMRC - you repeat this every 18 months and your software should remind you
- Check your accounting period in the software before your first update: it defaults to the tax year, and if your accounting period runs 1 April to 31 March you need to select calendar periods
- Start creating digital records, and send your first quarterly update when the period closes