This is about what Making Tax Digital does to the demand for an accountant, and therefore to your website. It is not tax guidance and we are not going to tell you how to file, because you know that part better than we do. For the rules that govern what a practice site has to say, we wrote those up separately in what UK rules require of a practice website.

The short version: three waves of sole traders and landlords are being moved into quarterly filing between 2026 and 2028. The first has already happened. A large share of those people have never paid for an accountant in their lives, and a good number of them are about to go looking for one.

The three waves, and the bit worth sitting with

You will know the bands. We are setting them out anyway, because the point we want to make about them is not the one usually made. HMRC's eligibility guidance has all three. Qualifying income over £50,000 in 2024 to 2025 brought someone into the regime on 6 April 2026. Over £30,000 in 2025 to 2026 brings them in on 6 April 2027. Over £20,000 in 2026 to 2027 brings them in on 6 April 2028.

Here is the bit worth sitting with. Every band is measured against a tax year that has already closed. The 2025 to 2026 year, the one that decides who is caught next April, ended four months ago. So the clients about to be dragged into this are not a forecast or a planning assumption. They are sitting in the returns you are working through this season, and you could pull the list this afternoon.

This is a client-acquisition event, not only a compliance one

The scale is HMRC's own, and two different numbers are circulating, so here are both. The policy paper on extending the regime put around 780,000 people joining from April 2026, with a further 970,000 from April 2027. A press notice on 5 February 2026 said more than 860,000 needed to start from 6 April. Those are different vintages of the same count rather than a contradiction, and either way the first wave alone runs to the high hundreds of thousands.

Now read that press notice from the other end. It tells people who use a tax agent to go and speak to their agent. It says nothing at all to the people who do not have one. That is the entire opportunity, in one omission.

You know the type, because you turn a few of them away every January. A landlord with two flats and a full-time job, who has always done their own return in an evening in the week before the deadline, and who has never once considered paying somebody to do it. That person has now been told they need compatible software and quarterly submissions. Some will shrug and buy the software. A meaningful number will work out what four filings a year actually means and decide this has stopped being a job they want.

Where they go next is Google. Which is why this is on a website blog rather than a tax one.

What those people actually type

We checked UK autocomplete on 14 August 2026, seeded a to z, with the locale pinned to the UK. It is a proxy for demand rather than a measurement of it, and we are not quoting search volumes anywhere on this page because we do not have a paid tool wired up and we are not going to invent numbers.

The generic terms are busy, and the panicky variants are busier than the technical ones. making tax digital runs the full ten suggestions deep, and so does mtd for landlords, whose suggestions include the threshold, the start date, the software, and whether it has been delayed. Those are not the questions of somebody comfortably on top of it.

The one that should interest you is making tax digital for accountants, also ten deep, and its suggestions split cleanly down the middle. Some are ours: what Making Tax Digital means for accountants. Some are plainly theirs: people looking for Making Tax Digital accountants near them, and what one costs. The same phrase is being typed by both sides of the table, which is exactly the position you want to be standing in.

Most practice sites are dead

We look at a lot of them, so we will be blunt about it. A news section last updated in 2023. A stock photo of two people shaking hands over a laptop. A services list that would fit any firm in Britain without changing a word. And nothing anywhere on the site that answers the question the visitor actually arrived with.

On this subject specifically, a practice site usually does one of two things. It says nothing about Making Tax Digital at all, or it carries a post written back when the start date was still expected to be 2024. The second is worse than the first. A visibly stale date does not just fail to help, it actively tells the reader that nobody has been near this site in three years, and invites them to wonder what else is being left.

The site got built once, and then there was a January, and then another one. We understand exactly how it happens and we are not pretending it makes anyone a bad accountant. It is still costing you work, and the wave arriving next April will not take the excuse into account.

What to put on yours before April 2027

Five things, in the order a worried stranger needs them. None of this is a rebuild. Most practices could add the lot to an existing page in an afternoon.

  • A page that states the bands and the dates in plain English. Not a link to HMRC, not a downloadable PDF. The thresholds and start dates, written out, on a page of yours that a search engine can actually read. This is the most common gap by a distance.
  • Put a visible date on it and keep it current. A page carrying a 2023 date is worse than no page. If you do nothing else on this list, do the date.
  • Answer "am I affected?" for the reader, not in general. The band deciding the April 2027 wave is measured against a year that has closed, so this has a definite answer today. Give it, rather than telling people to go and check with HMRC.
  • Say what you would actually do for them. Who picks the software, who makes the quarterly submissions, and what changes for the client who currently drops a carrier bag on the desk once a year. Somebody deciding whether to ring you is trying to picture the arrangement, and vagueness here is what loses them.
  • Say the authorisation point out loud. That is the next section, and it belongs on your site rather than in your first email, because it kills an objection before the reader has finished forming it.

None of that is marketing copy. It is the set of answers somebody already looking for you needs before they will pick up the phone, which is a different job from persuading somebody who was not looking in the first place.

The authorisation point worth saying out loud

One practical thing worth putting on the site rather than leaving in the first email. HMRC's guidance for agents signing clients up confirms that existing client authorisations for Self Assessment are recognised for Making Tax Digital for Income Tax. You need an agent services account, which is a separate thing from the older online services for agents, but an existing client does not have to be put through authorising you all over again.

Saying that plainly is worth more than another paragraph about your values. It answers the question a nervous prospect is actually holding, which is whether moving to you means a fortnight of admin they do not understand.

What we are claiming

Not tax advice, obviously. Every figure above is HMRC's, linked to HMRC, and the thresholds and dates are theirs to change. If you are deciding what your own clients have to do, read the guidance rather than us.

What we are claiming is this. A rule change that moves well over a million people into a new obligation across three years produces a wave of people looking for help, and the practices whose websites answer them will take a disproportionate share of it. That is not a clever insight, it is just timing, and the whole advantage goes to whoever is ready before April rather than after. We have written at more length about where the rest of that work sits in how accountancy practices actually get new clients.

If you want a view on whether your own site is ready, that is what we build for accountancy practices.