Yes, it's going to be a monumental pain in the arse; I've used the same Excel spreadsheets for probably fifteen years, they're completely fit for purpose and yet now I have to fuck about organising, learning to use and no doubt paying for software that I don't want or need.

I'll have to link my personal bank account whether I like it or not because that's the one my rent is paid out of (despite everything else going into/out of my work account) so yes, it's also intrusive. Obviously small business owners have nothing better to do

Exactly my point Amy.
Seems rather intrusive especially for people without business account.
I also wonder how will that work for those of us who have different occupation with HMRC than escort.
I mean surely for many of us the expenses even though solely used for work will be difficult to explain to bank even if HMRC doesn’t give a sh***.

For most people, it's annoying to painful.

The basic idea of 'Making Tax Digital' is that tax returns have to be submitted by specialist software. The option of using paper forms or, more usefully, the HMRC website which duplicates many of those but lets you fill them in online, would be over.

That it would happen was announced about ten years ago, but the wheels have run so slowly various people were wondering if it ever would. (Even when it comes to making laws, there are some which have been passed by Parliament and received Royal Assent but have never actually come into force.)

If you are unlucky enough to have business (escorting plus any other) income (not profit) of £90k a year, you should be registered for VAT. Even before the pain of having to charge it - which also means having to give VAT receipts with details you probably don't want to be handing out - you would have had to be dealing with MTD for the past few years.

The other change is that, as with VAT, people affected will have to submit something every quarter rather than just once a year. (The actual payment of tax will remain as one at the end of January the following tax year and, if the bill is high enough, a second one in July.)

The page linked to and the HMRC pages has some of the details: if your self-assessment income (not profit) from self-employment + property* is over £50k, it'll apply from April next year. If it's over £30k, it's likely to be from April 2027, and if it's over £20k, it's likely to be from April 2028.

At the moment people with a relevant income of under £20k won't have to deal with this. But if the limit doesn't change it will catch more people as time goes on, and if it does change, it might go down.

Once you're caught by this, you're stuck with it until your relevant income falls below the (currently) £20k for three consecutive years.

If you use someone like an accountant to fill in your forms, they should do this for you. They may well want to charge more for it.

At one point, various people I know had to use commercial software rather than the HMRC site to report income from a trust. The site didn't (and I think still doesn't) emulate that form. It cost about £20 a year, each, and the solution they chose was to change how they got the income so they wouldn't have to do that.

For income, the HMRC pages list a few free options:

1. Freeagent is only free if you have a NatWest group (so RBS, Ulster or Mettle as well as NatWest) business account. Having experience of NatWest, it's not one I'm going to ever want to use.

2. Academy of Energy is.. a pair of barely documented spreadsheets from something that talks about helping Russian energy suppliers a bit too much.

3. Self assessment direct / vat.direct takes a spreadsheet, as with the AoE, and uploads the details from it. Can't be less documented, so if I get caught by this, this is the one I will try first.

4. TaxNav, which doesn't seem to be available yet and whose site says 'try for free' rather than it being free.

Others may come along, because there are going to be plenty of people affected by this.

All this is about to affect companies as well, and there's an exemption for those who want to file in Welsh. I can see the temptation of this, and in starting a faith group with a religious reason for not using such electronic services (another exemption out there...) HMRC may not accept that someone using AW, with their own website, and using here really does have such a belief though! 

* There are a few more things, but for people here, these are likely to be it.

Who Needs to Sign Up for MTD for ITSA?

From April 2026, MTD for ITSA applies to individuals with a total gross income over £50,000 from self-employment and/or property. Those earning between £30,000 and £50,000 will join the scheme in April 2027. If your combined income from two self-employments meets these thresholds, you’ll need to comply.

Under £30,000 as its stands now you will not need to comply with MTD

Does that mean they will need to see receipts for everything? That means if you want to claim for advertising costs, condoms, lingerie and lubes it will be pretty obvious what what we do, won’t it? So we’d have to put our jobs down as sex worker?

As far as I am aware they simply want the figures eg turnover, profit, expense as a total, and not to trawl through the details unless as part of an investigation.

I don't want this turning into a clone of the main tax thread, but as has been posted there many times you can claim any expense you've incurred through work back against tax and this will go on your main expenses figure (which is then taken off your income to determine your tax liability). It doesn't matter what it is provided it's 100% a work expense.

If you're being investigated, trust me when I say they will already know what your job is (and won't care as long as you pay your tax). Back to the digital form filling thing now, I think

I can see that this could be a problem for escorts who have declared they do one thing - eg beauty consultant - and they have an accountant looking over their receipts who might say loads of them are unacceptable because they are not related to her business (I have dealt with this in a completely different business that I used to run).
Why would a XXXX what ever you are be spending ££££ on condoms and sex toys?

The problems are that the Worker is forced to come out to the accountant now because of her legitimate receipts, whereas before the accountant didn't see them and the Worker just declared "sundries", not specifically condoms and lube.

I'd be tempted to not include the condoms and lube receipts because my accountant has never known my job as a therapist included such activities. And I would probably deduct a few hundred of my cash takings to cover these costs -
************but this would be illegal!!!!************ so do not take this as advice. Furthermore, I actually won't be doing this because I do not offer penetrative sex, and I don't buy condoms.

As for hotel rooms, that's a different matter, Whatever you claim is your work you now tell your accountant that you have clients all over the country and you actually travel for your work. That's legit.

Clothing - if you have been claiming for clothing -- it is very rarely acceptable to claim clothing as legit expenditure under HMRC rules.

I think all these discussions aren't about what can we claim/ put down in our tax calculations they are about how we manage things under this new system.

Of course, under the old system, we were supposed to keep full records and receipts that could be inspected by HMRC randomly.  In previous jobs, I have had 2 random inspections by HMRC, and I'd prefer that rather than having to answer to the accountant.

HMRC inspectors are very fair, helpful, and nonjudgmental. However, many of us have a long relationship with our accountants, who might be local people.