HMRC published its monthly receipts bulletin at seven o’clock this morning. Four months into the tax year, the department has collected £322.7 billion in tax and National Insurance — £19.1 billion more than the same four months last year. That number will be read as a story about the public finances, quoted in a paragraph about borrowing, and forgotten by lunchtime. For an accountant it deserves rather longer, because it is not really a fiscal statistic. It is a description of your own client base, aggregated.
Almost none of that £19.1 billion came from a tax that did not exist a year ago. It came from thresholds standing still while incomes, property values and business valuations walked past them. Every pound of it passed through a transaction that somebody had to compute, and in a very large number of cases the person who computed it was an accountant. That is worth sitting with, because it means the profession holds a piece of information nobody else in the client’s life holds: the precise year in which a client stopped having an uncomplicated tax position and started having a planning problem.
What the bulletin actually says
The figures are HMRC’s own, covering April to July 2026, and they are worth reading in the order they appear rather than as a single headline:
- Total tax and NICs: £322.7 billion, which HMRC states is £19.1 billion higher than the same period last year.
- Income Tax, Capital Gains Tax and NICs together: £189.8 billion — up £13.2 billion. That single line is roughly seven-tenths of the entire year-on-year increase.
- Inheritance tax: £3.2 billion in four months, £0.1 billion higher than last year.
- Business taxes: £31.6 billion, up £3.7 billion.
- VAT: £64.8 billion (up £1.0 billion) and stamp taxes: £6.9 billion (up £0.5 billion).
Reporting the same release on 21 August 2026, Money Marketing put capital gains tax receipts for the 2025/26 tax year at a record £22.2 billion, and noted Office for Budget Responsibility projections of £34.9 billion a year by 2030/31. Simon Martin of Utmost, quoted in that report, warned that the rising burden on gains from investments, property and business assets risks making the UK less attractive to internationally mobile investors.
The composition matters more than the total. Where the growth is concentrated — personal income and gains, and business taxes — is precisely where an owner-managed business client lives.
Nobody legislated most of this
The thresholds explain the arithmetic. The inheritance tax nil-rate band has been £325,000 since 6 April 2009 and, on HMRC’s published rates, stays at £325,000 until 5 April 2031. The residence nil-rate band is £175,000 and runs at that level to 5 April 2030. The capital gains annual exempt amount is £3,000. The personal allowance for 2026/27 is £12,570, with the higher rate applying from £50,270.
Set against seventeen years of house price growth and a decade of wage growth, a fixed £325,000 does not do what it did in 2009. Nothing needs to be announced for a client to become liable; they simply have to keep owning the same house. The technical name for this is fiscal drag and the honest description of it is a tax rise that arrives without anybody having to vote for one.
For a practice, that has an operational consequence rather than a political one. The proportion of your client list sitting inside planning territory is not stable. It grows every year, on unchanged assets, and it grows silently — because nothing in the compliance cycle raises a flag when a client crosses a line they were previously under. The accounts still get filed. The return still gets submitted. The threshold is crossed on a spreadsheet nobody prints.
What it looks like inside one client file
Consider a widowed client, a retired company director, whose numbers have barely changed in five years. The figures below are illustrative — a composite, not a real client, and not a prediction about any particular estate.
- Main residence, passing to two adult children: £700,000
- ISAs and cash: £250,000
- Unused defined contribution pension: £400,000
The available allowances are £325,000 of nil-rate band plus £325,000 transferred from a late spouse, and £175,000 of residence nil-rate band plus £175,000 transferred — £1,000,000 in total, with the residence element depending on the home passing to direct descendants and tapering where an estate exceeds £2 million.
Under the rules in force today the estate for inheritance tax is £950,000. It falls under the £1,000,000 of allowances and no inheritance tax is due. From 6 April 2027, unused pension funds come into the estate: the same client, the same assets, the same house, and the estate becomes £1,350,000. Taxable value £350,000, at 40%, is an inheritance tax bill of £140,000 that did not exist the previous week. We set out that change in full in when the pension joins the estate.
Nobody in that example did anything. No asset was bought, sold or revalued. The only moving parts were a rule change and a frozen threshold — and the only professional with all three numbers written down in one place was the accountant who prepares the client’s tax return.
A receipts bulletin is not a story about the Treasury. It is several million client files, added up.
The conversation the numbers ask for
There is a persistent assumption that clients who need financial planning go and find it. The evidence does not support that. The lang cat’s State of Advice Report 2025 found that just 9% of UK adults had paid for financial advice in the previous two years — while 91% of those who did take advice found it valuable. A gap that wide between how few people take advice and how many rate it is not a demand problem. It is a distribution problem, and the profession best placed to close it is the one that already sees the numbers.
What a genuinely joined-up conversation looks like in practice is unglamorous. The accountant describes the position factually: here is the estate, here are the allowances, here is where the two meet, and here is what changes in April 2027. The financial planner takes the questions that turn on things the accountant does not hold — the client’s attitude to risk, their capacity for loss, their health, whether they can afford to give anything away, what their partner needs. Neither profession does the other’s work, and the client stops receiving two half-answers that never quite meet in the middle. We have written about that division of labour, and the line an accountant should not cross, in accountant and adviser.
The failure mode is not accountants giving regulated advice. It is far more often silence: a threshold crossed, noticed, mentally filed as somebody else’s department, and never raised again. The client finds out from a bill.
Two things worth doing this week
First, run a threshold pass over the top of the client list. Not a full review — a filter. Which clients hold a main residence plus a pension pot that, combined, will exceed the nil-rate bands available to them from 6 April 2027? Most practices can answer that from data they already hold, and the exercise takes an afternoon rather than a project. The output is a list, and the list is the agenda for the next round of year-end meetings.
Second, add one line to the year-end meeting template. Something factual and unpushy that opens the subject without straying into regulated territory: “On current figures your estate sits above the allowances once the pension counts from April 2027 — would it be useful to have someone look at what can be done about that?” That sentence is an observation and an offer. It recommends no product and takes no view on suitability. The signals worth attaching it to are set out in the six signals already sitting in your client file, and the case for looking hard at surplus cash specifically in the cash question.
What is not settled yet
Two things in this piece are fixed and one is not. The receipts above are published statistics for April to July 2026 and will not change. The thresholds cited are the rates HMRC currently publishes, and the pension change takes effect on 6 April 2027 under legislated policy.
What is not settled is what the next fiscal event does to any of it. Capital gains tax rates, the nil-rate bands and the treatment of pensions have all moved within the last two years, and the OBR projection of £34.9 billion of CGT by 2030/31 is a forecast built on current policy rather than a certainty. Anyone claiming to know what the Chancellor will announce is guessing. The practical response is not to wait: a plan built on the law as it stands can be revisited when the law moves, whereas a client who defers until the position is clear generally discovers that the position was clear enough all along.
The next monthly bulletin lands in late September and will cover April to August. The number will be larger. The interesting question is not what it says about borrowing, but how many of the clients behind it heard about their position from the professional who could see it coming.
Common questions
Does a rising tax take actually change anything for my clients?
Yes, and mostly without the client doing anything at all. The mechanism is fiscal drag: the thresholds that decide whether tax is due stay still while the numbers measured against them rise. The inheritance tax nil-rate band has been £325,000 since 6 April 2009 and is set to remain there until 5 April 2031. The capital gains annual exempt amount is £3,000. An estate or a shareholding that sat comfortably inside those figures three years ago may sit outside them now on identical assets. The practical consequence is that the population of clients with something to plan grows every year, quietly, and the accountant who prepares the numbers is the first person in a position to notice it.
Which numbers in a set of accounts point at a planning conversation?
The reliable ones are the ordinary ones. Retained profit growing for a third year with no extraction plan attached. Cash sitting well above the working capital the business actually needs. A director’s fifty-fifth birthday in the diary. A property or shareholding standing at a large unrealised gain. A personal guarantee on a new lease with nothing behind it. A first approach from a buyer. None of these is unusual and none requires special analysis to spot — they are visible in the file already open on the desk at the year-end meeting. What makes them signals rather than trivia is that each one has a decision attached that nobody has yet made.
Is talking to a client about inheritance tax regulated advice?
Explaining how inheritance tax works, what the nil-rate bands are, and how a client’s current position measures against them is tax work, and it sits squarely inside an accountancy practice’s ordinary remit. The line is crossed when the conversation moves to what the client should do about it in regulated territory — recommending a particular pension, investment, trust arrangement or protection policy, or advising on whether one is suitable for that individual. Those are regulated activities and they require the right permissions. Most firms find the boundary straightforward to hold once it is written down: describe the position, and where the answer involves a regulated product, involve someone authorised to advise on it.
When does an accountant hand over rather than handle it in-house?
Usually at the point where the answer stops being a computation and starts being a recommendation about a product. Working out that an estate will exceed the available nil-rate bands is arithmetic. Deciding whether the right response is a pension contribution, a policy written in trust, a programme of gifts, or nothing at all is regulated advice, and it turns on facts an accountant does not hold: attitude to risk, capacity for loss, health, and the client’s other commitments. A joined-up handover keeps both professionals working from one picture rather than two half-pictures — the accountant supplies what the numbers show, the planner supplies the recommendation and carries the regulatory responsibility for it.
What should we tell a client who says the rules will change again anyway?
That the rules currently in force are the ones their position is measured against, and that most of what is driving these receipts is not a rule change at all. The figures published on 21 August 2026 reflect thresholds frozen for years rather than a new tax. Waiting for the next fiscal event carries a cost of its own: some responses need time to work, and a few stop being available once a transaction has completed or a client’s health has changed. The more useful framing is that a plan built on today’s law can be revisited when the law moves, whereas a decision deferred indefinitely simply becomes whatever the default outcome turns out to be.