Sign your clients up to MTD for Income Tax

This article provides a simple guide on how to sign your eligible clients up to Making Tax Digital (MTD) for Income Tax.

1. Sign up for MTD for Income Tax with HMRC

When you sign up a client through HMRC’s web portal, HMRC will ask you some questions and carry out some checks to ensure your client can sign up, and confirm this with you. 

You'll be presented with the option to add a business name for the client, which we'd highly encourage you to do. This is particularly important if your client has multiple sole trader businesses needing to be signed up for MTD for Income Tax as you'll need to choose which business to link to each FreeAgent account. Find out more in this useful video from HMRC.

Once you receive confirmation, you’ll be able to connect FreeAgent with HMRC for MTD for Income Tax.

As you’ll need your client’s permission to sign them up, please talk to your client first. You would need to tell them:

• what you’re signing them up to
• what it means for them
• that HMRC’s new penalties will apply to them if they miss deadlines for submitting their tax updates or paying their bill.
• HMRC will write to them to confirm when late submissions would make them liable for these penalties

Once you have confirmation, visit HMRC’s MTD for Income Tax client signup page and select ‘Continue’ to check the restrictions on who can sign up early for MTD for Income Tax.

Enter your client’s details and select ‘Continue’.

If the client is eligible, you can continue to sign up the client or check the eligibility of another client.

Select ‘Yes’ to ‘Are you or your client using software that works with Making Tax Digital for Income Tax?’ and click ‘Continue’.

Select ‘Current tax year’ to sign up the client for the test phase or ‘Next tax year’ in preparation for the 2026/27 tax year and click ‘Continue’.

You’ll then see details of what you and your client are agreeing to and what obligations will need to be met when you sign them up.

Select ‘Accept and continue’.

You’ll then see pre-populated data from the client's previous year's Self Assessment. If you need to, you can add details of any missing income sources.

Once you’ve added any missing income sources (if applicable), select ‘Save and continue’.

Check that the client’s information is correct and select ‘Confirm and continue’ to complete the process.

You’ll then see confirmation that the client has been signed up to MTD for Income Tax and you can sign up additional clients if you need to.

If your client has more than one qualifying income stream, they’ll need separate FreeAgent accounts for each trade and another separate account if they also rent out property that they own. Read more about how to use FreeAgent for Making Tax Digital (MTD) for Income Tax if you’re a sole trader with multiple businesses or rental income

If you have landlord clients who own property jointly, you will need to sign each of the owners up for MTD for Income Tax separately.