Making Tax Digital: what your website should be telling clients

Making Tax Digital for Income Tax is no longer a thing that is coming. The first phase started in April 2026, and the next two are already dated. For an accountancy practice that means a large number of clients who are about to be affected, most of whom do not yet know it, and almost all of whom will find out from somebody.

That somebody should be you. Not because explaining Making Tax Digital is a service you can bill for, but because being the practice that told them first is worth more than most marketing you could buy.

Where the thresholds currently sit

Three phases, based on qualifying income, which HMRC defines as gross income from self-employment and property before any expenses or allowances are taken off. That definition catches people out constantly, because it is turnover rather than profit.

• From April 2026: qualifying income above £50,000. Live now.
• From April 2027: qualifying income above £30,000.
• From 6 April 2028: qualifying income above £20,000, assessed on the 2026 to 2027 tax year.

Those in scope keep digital records, use compatible software, and send quarterly updates to HMRC rather than a single annual return.

HMRC's own figures give a sense of the scale: roughly 864,000 individuals in the first phase, a further 1,077,000 joining in 2027, and around 975,000 more in 2028. Whatever the size of your client book, a meaningful slice of it is in there.

Why this is a website problem

Three reasons, and only one of them is marketing.

Volume. You cannot have this conversation individually with two hundred clients. You can write it once, properly, and send everyone the link.

Search. This is one of the few genuinely high-demand subjects in accountancy, and demand spikes every spring as the next cohort works out it applies to them. Most of what ranks is national and generic. A local practice that explains it plainly, and says who to ring about it, competes surprisingly well.

Positioning. A client who first hears about a rule change from their accountant has a different relationship with that accountant than one who hears about it from a Facebook group. Being ahead of it is the whole proposition of a good practice, and this is a rare chance to demonstrate it rather than assert it.

What the page should actually say

Am I affected, in a form someone can self-check. The thresholds are simple but the definition of qualifying income is not intuitive. Spell out that it is gross rental plus gross self-employment income, before costs, and give an example of somebody who assumes they are under and is not. Two rental properties and a modest side trade adds up faster than people think.

What changes for me, practically. Not the policy rationale. What lands differently in their year: records kept digitally, software involved, updates during the year rather than one return after it.

What I have to do, and what you do.The single most reassuring section, and the one most often missing. Most clients' real question is not about tax policy, it is “how much of this becomes my problem?”

What it costs. Quarterly reporting is more work than annual reporting, and if your fees are changing, say so on the page rather than in a letter in March. Clients handle a fee change far better when it arrives with an explanation attached and months of notice.

What to do now. One clear next step, dated. Vague reassurance produces no action and the deadline arrives anyway.

Give people a way to check themselves

The thing most people want is not an article, it is an answer to “does this apply to me?” A short checker that asks a few questions and tells them where they stand does that far better than eight hundred words, and people share it in a way they never share a blog post.

We built a free MTD readiness checker for exactly that. It is free to use, and if you want something like it on your own practice website, that is the kind of thing we build.

Keep it dated, and keep it current

This is the most perishable content on an accountancy website. Thresholds and timings have already moved more than once, and there is no guarantee they have finished moving.

So put a visible “correct as of” line on the page, and diarise a review after each Budget. A page confidently quoting a superseded threshold does more damage than no page at all, because the audience most likely to notice is the one you are trying to impress. That principle applies to anything with a figure in it, which is why our own tools carry the date they were last checked.

Common questions

Is qualifying income the same as profit? No, and this is the most common misunderstanding. It is gross income from self-employment and property before expenses and allowances, so someone can be well under the threshold on profit and over it on qualifying income.

Should we write about this now or nearer the deadline? Now. Search interest builds through the spring before each phase, and pages take months to rank. A page published in August is established by the time the next cohort starts looking.

Does this apply to limited companies? Not this phase. Making Tax Digital for Income Tax covers sole traders and landlords. Worth stating explicitly on your page, because a good number of your company clients will ask.

Thresholds and dates above are taken from HMRC guidance and were checked in August 2026. Confirm against GOV.UK before relying on them.

Part of our guide to website design for accountants. If you want the MTD explainer, the checker and the client emails built as one piece of work, talk to us.