How to Sign Up for Making Tax Digital

Every guide on this site tells you whether Making Tax Digital for Income Tax applies to you and when. None of them, until now, walked through the sign-up step itself, and that step has changed shape recently: HMRC is about to start doing it for some people automatically. Here's exactly what GOV.UK's sign-up guidance says, quoted directly, checked live the day this page was written.

HMRC starts signing landlords up automatically from September 2026

If your qualifying income passes £50,000 for the tax year assessed on your 2024-25 return, you're mandated from 6 April 2026. Until recently, getting into the system was entirely on you. That changes this September: from September 2026, HMRC will start to sign up anyone who needs to use Making Tax Digital for Income Tax for the 2026 to 2027 tax year and has not signed themselves up. If we've signed you up, you can find out what to do next. Put plainly: if you're mandated for this tax year and you haven't acted by the time HMRC runs this process, HMRC does it for you rather than leaving you unregistered.

That sounds like it removes the job from your list, and in one narrow sense it does, but GOV.UK is specific about what an automatic sign-up actually uses: when HMRC signs you up, we use only the information we already hold about you. This may not include any changes to your circumstances since you last submitted a tax return. If you've started a new letting, sold a property, or changed your business address since your last return, an automatic sign-up won't know that. You'd then need to update your information in the service, or contact HMRC directly, to get your record straight, which is more work than the sign-up would have been in the first place. See which wave your qualifying income falls into before deciding whether to wait.

Two conditions gate the sign-up service, and both must be true

Whether you sign yourself up or wait, GOV.UK sets out exactly who the service will accept. The guidance lists it as a short, unambiguous pair of conditions: be registered for Self Assessment; have submitted a tax return in the last 2 years. Both conditions have to hold at once. A landlord who has never filed a Self Assessment return, or whose most recent return is now more than two years old, isn't eligible to sign up through this route yet, and needs to sort out Self Assessment registration first. You also still need to submit a Self Assessment return for the tax year immediately before the one you start using Making Tax Digital for, even once you're signed up. Our threshold checker tells you which wave your own share of rental income lands in before you check these two conditions against your own filing history.

Signing up isn't only for people who are already mandated, either. GOV.UK allows landlords to volunteer in ahead of their own wave, for the current tax year or the next one, which lets you get comfortable with quarterly updates before they're compulsory. If you're not sure whether volunteering early or waiting for your mandation date makes more sense for your own portfolio, our complete guide for landlords covers the full set of obligations you'll be taking on either way.

What the sign-up service actually asks you for

Once you start the sign-up service itself, the credential question is the first thing people ask, and GOV.UK answers it directly: you'll need to use the same user ID and password you got when you registered for Self Assessment. There's no separate Making Tax Digital account to create from scratch; your existing Government Gateway login carries over, and you use it whether you're a sole trader, a landlord, or both at once. You may also be asked to prove your identity again on top of that login, either by using an app on your phone to match a photo of your face against your passport or driving licence, or by answering questions HMRC already has answers to, like details from a recent payslip, your latest P60, or your Self Assessment history itself. Which route you get isn't something you choose in advance; the service decides based on what it can already verify about you.

Beyond your login, the service wants a small, specific set of details: the date your letting or self-employment income started, if that was within the last two tax years, and confirmation of the tax year you want to start using Making Tax Digital from. If you also run a sole-trade alongside your lettings, you'll be asked for the business name you use on invoices, its address, and the nature of that trade. Landlords with more than one property business need to check and confirm each one separately in the service, not just the first one that comes up, and add any that are missing rather than assuming the service already knows about a portfolio you built up across more than one letting.

Sign yourself up before the automatic process, and pick your moment

There's a practical reason to act before HMRC's automatic process runs, beyond just staying ahead of a deadline: signing yourself up is the only way to guarantee your own details, not whatever HMRC already holds on file, are the ones that go in. There's also a scheduling reason worth knowing about now, months ahead of time. GOV.UK's sign-up page currently carries this notice: "there is planned maintenance from Friday 11 September 2026 5pm to 1pm on Tuesday 15 September 2026. You'll not be able to sign up for Making Tax Digital for Income Tax during this time." That window sits inside the same month HMRC's own automatic sign-up process begins, so if you'd rather control the timing yourself, signing up before mid-September avoids both the wait for HMRC's process and this specific gap in the service. Downtime notices like this one change on GOV.UK's own schedule, so if you're reading this well after publication, check the sign-up page directly for whatever notice is live when you visit.

Once you're signed up, whichever route got you there, the obligations are the same: digital records, quarterly updates, and one final declaration a year, all of which our other guides cover in detail. Join the waitlist below and we'll email you before your first deadline arrives.