Landlords will spend six full days a year coping with Making Tax Digital (MTD) for Income Tax, it’s claimed.
This week marks six months since MTD came into force, requiring landlords with annual revenues over £50,000 to keep digital records and update HMRC every quarter, rather than once a year.
With the change still in its infancy and rolling out to owners with revenues over £30,000 in 2027, a business management platform – Tide – asked 500 users of MTD how much time the added admin cost them.
Nearly half (44%) expect MTD admin to eat into their normal working hours, with 36%) stating that this will be during time they would otherwise be serving paying clients and customers.
For many, the burden is heavier still: more than half (58%) expect it to take more than a working week, with more than one in eight (13%) predicting that MTD will require more than 10 full days of their time in year one alone.
When the working day runs out, personal time is also paying the price. 38% expect to complete their MTD admin in the evenings, 35% at weekends and 32% during planned time off or while on holiday.
The research also reveals that this lost time comes at a cost.
Based on respondents’ average daily revenue, the average six days lost to MTD admin equals £1,778 in income per business in the first year alone, or £1.5 billion* across the 864,000 qualifying businesses.
A Tide spokesperson says: .“With the … next update due by November 7, now is the time to make MTD work around the business, not the other way round.”
This article is taken from Landlord Today