MTD Quarterly Filing Dates

Once Making Tax Digital for Income Tax applies to you, the day-to-day obligation is a quarterly update: four deadlines a year, each one due on the 7th of the month. This page is the canonical deadline table — bookmark it, or better, download the dates straight into your calendar below.

Add these deadlines to your calendar (.ics)

The rule almost everyone gets wrong: updates are cumulative

Each quarterly update is cumulative — it covers everything from the start of the tax year (6 April) right through to the end of that update period, not just the previous three months. Your Q2 update doesn't just cover July to September; it covers the whole year so far, from April onward. HMRC updated its guidance to make this explicit on 2 June 2026, and it's the single most common mistake in third-party MTD content — worth repeating clearly: you're never submitting a fresh three-month snapshot, you're submitting a running total that grows with every update.

In practice that means your Q4 update for a tax year ends up covering the entire twelve months in one figure, which is also why it's the update that lines up most closely with your eventual final declaration.

Standard periods vs. the calendar election

HMRC gives you two ways to slice your quarters: the standard tax-year-aligned periods (6 April to 5 July, and so on), or the "calendar election" option that rounds to full calendar months (1 April to 30 June, and so on) if that fits your existing bookkeeping better. Pick whichever matches how you already keep records — the deadlines above are identical either way, so switching doesn't buy you extra time, it just changes which transactions land in which bucket.

What you're actually submitting

A quarterly update isn't a tax return and it isn't a tax bill. It's a running summary of your income and expense totals for the period, broken into HMRC's standard categories. There's no tax calculation and no payment attached to it — that all happens later, at the final declaration, once the full tax year is in.

Because it's a summary rather than a full breakdown, you don't need to itemise every transaction in the submission itself — you still keep your underlying digital records (that's the other MTD obligation), but what HMRC receives each quarter is totals per category: rent received, letting agent fees, mortgage interest, repairs, and so on, added up for the cumulative period. Software that's built for MTD, or a bridging tool that maps your spreadsheet onto HMRC's categories, handles this calculation for you rather than asking you to type the totals in by hand.

A worked example: say your Q1 figures show 6 April 2026 to 5 July 2026 of income and expenses. By Q2, the same submission covers everything from 6 April 2026 through to 5 October 2026 — Q1's figures plus whatever happened in between, not a fresh three-month total starting from zero.

The final declaration

Once the tax year ends, you have until 31 January 2028 to submit your final declaration for the 2026-27 tax year — the modern equivalent of your old Self Assessment return, where the four quarterly updates get pulled together and your final tax position is confirmed, including any reliefs or adjustments that don't fit neatly into a quarterly figure. Payment dates don't change because of MTD: you still pay by the same deadlines you always have.

Set a reminder before you need one

Deadline-day scrambles are avoidable. Download the .ics file above and every quarterly deadline for the next two tax years lands in your phone or desktop calendar as a proper event, alongside the final declaration date — no need to remember the pattern or check a webpage every few months. It works with Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, and Outlook — most desktop and mobile calendar apps.

Missed a deadline?

For the 2026 to 2027 tax year, there are no penalties for missing a quarterly update deadline — HMRC's soft landing while everyone adjusts to the new rhythm. From later years, missed deadlines build toward a points-based penalty instead of an instant fine. We cover the full picture, alongside the mandation thresholds themselves, in MTD deadlines & thresholds.

New to MTD for Income Tax altogether? Start with what Making Tax Digital for Income Tax actually is, or see how these dates apply if you let an HMO or holiday property in our HMO & holiday-let landlords guide.