MTD Quarterly Update Deadlines: The Full 2026–27 Calendar

If you’re mandated into Making Tax Digital for Income Tax from April 2026, your reporting calendar has changed completely. Instead of one Self Assessment deadline a year, you now have four MTD deadlines for quarterly updates, plus the familiar 31 January final declaration. Get the shape of these deadlines wrong — especially the fact that each update is cumulative rather than a fresh quarter — and you’ll either panic over nothing or catch yourself out for real. Here’s the full 2026–27 calendar and how it actually works.

Disclaimer: This article provides general information only and does not constitute tax advice. Consult a qualified tax adviser or accountant for advice specific to your circumstances.

The full MTD deadlines calendar for 2026–27

HMRC splits the tax year into four reporting periods, each with its own submission deadline:

Look closely at the “period covered” column and you’ll notice it doesn’t reset each quarter — every single period starts on 6 April. That’s not a typo. It’s the single most important thing to understand about how MTD quarterly updates actually work.

Why the updates are cumulative, not four separate quarters

Under the old mental model — four quarters, like school terms — you’d expect each update to cover just its own three-month slice: April to June, July to September, and so on. That’s not what HMRC asks for.

Every MTD quarterly update is cumulative. Your August update covers 6 April to 5 July, much like a standalone quarter would. But your November update doesn’t cover 6 July to 5 October in isolation — it covers 6 April to 5 October, the whole year so far. Your February update covers 6 April to 5 January. And your final update in May covers the entire tax year, 6 April to 5 April.

In practice, each update is a running year-to-date total of your income and expenses, not a series of four independent snapshots.

This matters for one big reason: small errors mostly correct themselves without a separate amendment. If you miscategorise an expense or miss a receipt during the period covered by your August update, you don’t need to go back and formally amend that submission. Fix your underlying records, and the correction flows through into the larger, more accurate year-to-date figure you submit in November. Because each update recalculates from 6 April, in-year mistakes get absorbed into the next cumulative total rather than triggering a formal correction process. It’s a more forgiving system than most people expect. If you’ve already missed a deadline outright rather than just misfiled a figure, see what actually happens when you miss an MTD quarterly update — the cumulative structure helps there too.

The calendar-quarter election

The standard periods above end on the 5th of the month, a quirk inherited from the traditional start of the UK tax year. If that’s awkward for your bookkeeping — most bank statements and invoices run to calendar months, not the 5th — you can elect to use calendar-quarter periods instead: 1 April–30 June, 1 April–30 September, 1 April–31 December, and 1 April–31 March.

The deadlines themselves don’t move. You still submit by 7 August, 7 November, 7 February and 7 May — only the period boundaries shift slightly to align with calendar month-ends. Most record-keeping and filing software let you set this election once, and it applies automatically to every period afterwards.

Nil updates are mandatory too

There’s no threshold below which you can skip a submission. If you had no income and no expenses in a given period — a quiet spell, time between contracts, a vacant rental — you still need to submit a nil update by the same deadline. HMRC’s system doesn’t treat silence as “nothing to report”; it expects an update either way, even if every box is zero. For exactly what a quarterly update needs to contain (and, just as importantly, what it doesn’t), see what actually goes in a quarterly update.

After the four updates: the final declaration

The four quarterly updates aren’t your tax return. Once the tax year ends, you finalise everything through your final declaration, due by 31 January — the same date the Self Assessment deadline has always fallen on. This is where you add anything the quarterly updates didn’t capture, such as capital allowances or reliefs, confirm your figures are complete, and trigger your actual tax calculation. If you’re already familiar with the January deadline from previous years, our Self Assessment deadline guide covers what that submission itself involves.

Building a rhythm that hits every deadline

Four deadlines a year sounds like a lot until you realise they map onto a simple habit: capture expenses as they happen, check your categorised totals a week or so before each deadline, and submit. Quarterly updates are just category totals — HMRC doesn’t want your actual receipts — so the real work happens continuously in the background, not in a scramble the night before 7 August.

That’s the gap Taxr fills. It isn’t MTD filing software and won’t submit your updates to HMRC directly — you’ll still need MTD-recognised filing software or an accountant for that. What Taxr does is keep the records layer clean: photograph a receipt and the AI extracts the vendor, date, total and VAT, then files it under a tax-aligned category automatically. By the time a deadline rolls around, your quarterly totals are already sitting there, ready to export as Excel or PDF for your software or your accountant. For a fuller picture of how a records app and filing software work together, read MTD software vs receipt apps, and if you’re not yet sure which threshold wave applies to you, run your numbers through our MTD threshold checker.

Download Taxr free — 10 scans on us and stop meeting quarterly deadlines with a shoebox of paper.