TAXING TIMES

The self-assessment tax return process is getting an onerous shakeup. Katie Rosseinsky speaks to experts about how Making Tax Digital will actually impact self-employed people

- Katie Rosseinsky

Want to strike fear and panic into the heart of any freelancer? Just whisper the words “self-assessment tax return” and then watch their fight or flight mode activate in real time.

Even if you have been happily self-employed for decades, the chances are pretty high that whenever tax return season rolls around each year, you'll start to seriously question your life choices. Sure, you don't have a boss and the office politics are nonexistent, but wouldn't you take a bit of inter-colleague passive aggression if it meant you never had to deal with HMRC's online webchat again? And which cruel soul decided that the deadline had to fall in January, when you're already feeling skint and sorry for yourself?

From next spring, though, the decades-old self-assessment process is about to undergo a shakeup. As a result, freelancers will have a new set of simultaneously boring but mildly terrifying buzzwords to get het up over – and those words are “making tax digital”.

After teasing the rollout for longer than the interminable promotional cycle of the last James Bond movie, HMRC will be introducing this new initiative for reporting income from self-employment from April 2026. And not everyone is particularly thrilled about this development. Ask the freelancers in your life about their thoughts on “making tax digital”, and they'll likely embark on a stressed-out rant or simply look at you blankly. Earlier this year, a report from software company IRIS found that 31 per cent of sole traders (that's someone who owns and runs their own business) had never even heard of it.