How Much Does MTD Software Cost? £0 to £348 a Year for Self-Serve Filing

Making Tax Digital for Income Tax asks the same thing of everybody it catches: four quarterly updates per income source, then one final declaration. There is no premium version of the obligation. A £348-a-year product and a £0 product send HMRC the same submissions through the same APIs.

Yet the software to do it is sold across roughly a 30x range, and that range is not organised the way a buyer would expect. This page is the price list, band by band, and then the question underneath it: what does the extra money buy, and what does it demonstrably not buy.

Every count below is computed live from our 9 August 2026 scrape of HMRC's directory of 127 products. Every price was read from the vendor's own pages in August 2026 and is dated as such. Prices move, listings move, and the live directory table is the version that updates itself.

What does MTD software cost in August 2026?

Every product on HMRC's directory that our August 2026 pricing pass could put a dated, vendor-sourced, one-person price against, cheapest first. Two sets are deliberately absent and it is worth saying which. The free tools bundled with a bank or business account are a different purchase and are covered separately in bank free MTD tools compared. And Zoho, which is listed and sells directly, is missing because we could not verify a UK MTD price for it and will not publish a guess; the reasoning is on the Zoho comparison.

Sorted by what one person pays for a full MTD year, with VAT added where the vendor quotes without it, because a mandated sole trader under the VAT registration threshold cannot reclaim it. Where a vendor quotes a monthly and an annual rate, the cheaper of the two is used and the monthly figure is multiplied by twelve. Two kinds of price are deliberately not the sort key, because neither is what one person pays: shared multi-taxpayer licences, so Absolute Excel Income Tax Filer sits at the £40 plus VAT one person pays rather than the £8 a head five people pay, and conditional rates, so FreeAgent sits at its sole trader list price rather than at the £0 it charges customers of four named banks. Both are unpacked below.

HMRC lists what each vendor declares. Feature flags, mobile-app support in particular, are vendor claims rather than verified facts, and listings change. Check with the vendor before you buy. Data: HMRC find-MTD-software service (tax.service.gov.uk), scraped 9 August 2026.

The four price bands, and what separates them

The £0 floor

Free is a real category now rather than a marketing word. The genuinely free MTD software roundup works through the catches in detail, so the useful question to add here is a different one: who is paying for it, because the funding model tells you how long the price lasts.

Four models are at work. My Tax Digital has no paid tier at all, so nothing funds it commercially. Clear Books and TaxHeaven run the classic freemium shape, with paid tiers at £5 and £15 a month and £58.80 a year respectively subsidising the free one, checked August 2026. GetGround gives MTD away as a loss leader for its SPV incorporation business. The banks, covered separately in bank free MTD tools compared, fund it from the current account.

Only the freemium shape makes the free tier the product's own responsibility. The rest are free for as long as a strategy elsewhere holds, which is not the same thing as free forever.

£20 to £60 a year: the filing specialists

This band is almost entirely bridging tools and dedicated MTD filers. No invoicing, no bank feeds, usually no app, and no ambition beyond getting correct numbers to HMRC. They price accordingly.

If your records already live in a spreadsheet, this band is where the honest answer usually is, and the MTD spreadsheet template and bridging costs guide goes through that route properly, including the free template.

£75 to £150 a year: the mainstream subscription band

The most crowded band, and the one where price stops predicting anything. Full accounting suites, dedicated tax apps, landlord platforms and bank-adjacent bookkeeping tools all sit in it, sharing almost nothing except roughly what they charge.

£180 a year and up

Above about £150 a year you are usually not buying more filing but a property-management platform or a person. PaTMa and Landlord Vision are portfolio software where MTD is one module among tenancy, arrears and compliance tracking. Kletta's £49 a month Care plan buys a real UK bookkeeper, which is a different purchase from software and should not be compared like for like against a £20 filing tool.

This is also why the £348 in this page's title is scoped to self-serve software rather than to the whole market. £348 is the dearest self-serve tier we priced, Kletta Duo at £29 a month. The table above goes higher: Kletta Care is £588 a year and Landlord Vision reaches about £1,020 at its Enterprise tier. Neither is a filing price, which is the point, but quoting £348 as the ceiling of everything would understate a range this page itself documents.

Kletta is also the clearest illustration of why list prices at this end deserve suspicion. Its self-serve tiers list at £19 and £29 a month, which is £228 and £348 a year, but its own site was running 50% to 70% discounts when we checked in August 2026, taking Solo to £9.50 and Duo to £9.90 a month. A list price that is never charged is an anchor, not a price.

FreeAgent is the band's awkward case and the sharpest counterexample on this page, so it belongs here rather than in a footnote. Its sole trader plan lists at £19 a month, which is £228 a year, and HMRC grades it ready on 15 of the 16 return items, checked August 2026. That is real completeness at a real price, and it cuts against the pattern the rest of this section describes. It is also free outright if you bank with NatWest, RBS, Ulster or Mettle, which makes its effective price for a large number of sole traders nothing at all. Both things are true, and the second one is the reason its list price is a poor guide to what anyone actually pays.

Does paying more buy a more complete return?

This is the question the price list cannot answer on its own, and the answer surprised us.

HMRC grades every listed product against 16 specific tax-return items: employment income, dividends, interest, pensions, the Construction Industry Scheme, capital gains and so on. It is the difference between software that files your quarters and software that can finish your year.

That cliff, and how it formed, is the subject of our analysis of all 127 listed MTD tools. What that piece did not do is set it against price.

Do that and the relationship runs backwards. Across the 27 listed products in our August 2026 pricing sample, ranked by what one person pays for a year, the cheaper half averaged around 10 of the 16 return items ready and the dearer half averaged under 4. That is the opposite of what a buyer would assume. The direction survives when the five free products are dropped and only the 22 paid ones are compared, though it narrows there to roughly 8 against under 5, so treat it as a real tilt rather than a rule.

The extremes make the point faster than the average does. Only 3 products on the entire directory are graded ready on all 16 items, and one of them, MTD 4 Income Tax, costs £20 a year, checked August 2026. The most expensive entry tier in our sample costs more than ten times that and is graded ready on none.

The band where this gets uncomfortable is £120 to £144 a year as the vendors quote it, or £130 to £144 once VAT is added where it applies. Six products sit inside that spread, and HMRC grades them from none of the 16 return items to almost all of them.

Two readings of that table are wrong. It does not mean cheap software is better, and it does not mean the products graded at zero are bad. It means the expensive end of this market is mostly not selling return completeness. It is selling property management, invoicing, bookkeeping automation or human support, and completeness is orthogonal to all four. The mistake is assuming you bought it because you paid for it.

What the extra money does buy

Three things, none of which HMRC's directory grades.

Automation. Bank feeds, AI categorisation and receipt capture do not appear anywhere in HMRC's graded flags, so no dataset can rank them. This is the clearest thing paid tiers buy: the £20-a-year filing specialists are almost all manual entry, and the £100-plus products almost all import your transactions for you.

A phone. 56of 127 (44%)list a mobile app at allHMRC MTD for Income Tax directory, scraped 9 August 2026 Mobile skews paid, though not cleanly. Clear Books Free and RentalBux Free both list apps on both platforms at £0, while 123 Sheets at £19.75 plus VAT lists no app at all. Forbes MTD is the row to be careful with rather than to quote: its listing declares an Android app and records the software as a desktop and browser product running on Windows and Mac OS, while our own August 2026 research described it as Windows desktop only. We are flagging that rather than picking a side, because mobile is a vendor-declared field that HMRC does not verify and this dataset contradicts itself on it in both directions. The app stores are the only test that settles it.

People. Kletta Care at £49 a month includes a UK bookkeeper, Crunch's model is an accountancy firm with software attached, and off the directory entirely there are per-return services priced from £125 upward, all checked August 2026. That is a different purchase from software, priced accordingly.

What the money does not buy is worth stating just as plainly. It does not buy return-item completeness, as above. It does not buy compliance: HMRC's recognition process is the same for a £0 product and a £348 one, so price is not a safety signal here. And 19 of 127 (15%) of the directory list a free version yet cannot complete a single return item, which tells you the quarterly-updates-only design is a product decision rather than a budget one.

Four ways the price you see is not the price you pay

The five ways free is not free are covered elsewhere. These four apply to paid pricing, and they are the ones that move a budget.

1. VAT, which about half this market quotes without. Xero, Sage, Crunch, QuickBooks, DIY Tax, Hammock, VitalTax, 123 Sheets, Absolute and Forbes all quote ex VAT. APARI and PaTMa quote inclusive. FreeAgent states neither, which is its own small trap. A mandated sole trader under the VAT registration threshold cannot reclaim it, so ex VAT quoting understates their real cost by a fifth. DIY Tax at £75 plus VAT is £90 to that person, checked August 2026.

2. Per licence, not per person. Absolute Excel Income Tax Filer is widely quoted at about £8 a taxpayer a year, and that figure is real, but only if you have five taxpayers to share the £40 plus VAT licence with. One sole trader filing alone pays £48 including VAT, six times the headline. VitalTax runs the same shape at £30 for one taxpayer and £198 for unlimited. Bridging economics are excellent for a family, a partnership or an accountant, and unremarkable for one person.

3. Metering and caps, which make the price a function of your usage. Nexus by Landlord Studio's free Go plan charges around £5 per MTD submission, roughly £25 a year for someone filing four quarters and a final declaration, and it is the only per-submission MTD meter we found anywhere. untied Lite at £64.99 carries a £90,000 self-employed income cap, so a good year moves you to Pro at £129.99. Both are honest, and neither is a number you can budget in advance.

4. The renewal. This is the big one. Kletta's 50% to 70% discounts, 123 Sheets at £19.75 in year one against a list of about £39.50, Landlord Vision's 60% two-year promotion and MTD 4 Income Tax's free first month all mean the advertised number is a first-period number. Xero deserves its own mention because the movement is documented rather than promotional: it retired its Starter and Standard line for new customers in September 2024, raised prices on 1 September 2025, and a further UK increase is confirmed for 1 September 2026. Budget the rate in month seven.

What should you actually budget?

Three honest tiers, which map to what you are buying rather than to vendor marketing.

£0 for the legal minimum. If you have one income source, few transactions and no objection to typing them in, the obligation genuinely costs nothing. My Tax Digital, Clear Books Free, TaxHeaven Angel and Self Assessment Direct all file at £0 as of August 2026, and 10 of 127 (8%) pair a free version with 9 or more return items ready.

£20 to £100 a year to stop doing data entry. This is where automation starts and where most mandated sole traders and landlords will land. The cheapest and simplest MTD options guide works through that trade-off, and the honest version of it is that manual entry has a time cost you should price before deciding free is cheaper.

£150 a year and up to hand it to someone. A bookkeeper, an accountancy firm or a full property-management platform. Valid purchases, but be clear that is what you are buying, because the filing part is available for a tenth of it.

The question that eliminates options fastest is not "what does it cost" but "what does it cost for the parts I will use". Someone with a trade, a rental and a pension should shop the completeness column first. Someone with one trade and forty transactions a month needs automation and can almost ignore completeness.

Where TapTax sits on this curve

We build TapTax, so the same standard applies.

Our pricing is £0 for the free tier, £4.99 a month or £49 a year for Starter, and £9.99 a month or £99 a year for Pro. That puts Starter in the cheap half of the automated band and well above the filing specialists.

Two things belong in the against-us column. TapTax was not on HMRC's directory on the 9 August 2026 scrape. We are MTD-compatible, built directly on HMRC's Making Tax Digital APIs, and we are going through HMRC's recognition process now. And on the 16 return items we are mid-pack with roughly 6 to 8 ready, so by the measure this whole page is built on, MTD 4 Income Tax at £20 a year beats us on completeness while costing less. If completeness per pound is your only criterion, it is the better buy today and we would rather say so here.

What Starter buys against this curve is automation at roughly the price of a filing specialist: bank import, categorisation and receipt capture at £4.99 a month, where most products offering that sit further up the band. What it does not buy is an advantage on completeness, and the cheap end of this market is stronger than its price suggests. Every product in the £20 to £60 table above covers foreign property, which is more than several better-known products manage. That is the honest reading, and it is why we are pushing on return items rather than on price.

How we priced this, and what it cannot tell you

Prices came from vendor pricing pages read in August 2026, not from HMRC, because the directory records no pricing at all. Product grades come from our 9 August 2026 scrape and render from that snapshot at page load, so they move when the directory moves. Three limits worth stating.

The pricing sample is 27 listed products, not all 127. It covers the products with published self-serve pricing and meaningful UK search demand, and it deliberately leaves out the free bank-bundled tools, which biases it toward what people actually shop for and pay for. The negative price-to-completeness relationship is a finding about that sample on that date, not a law of the market.

Return items are one axis and a narrow one. A product graded at zero may be excellent at what it does. Reading the grade as a quality score would be the same error as reading the price as one.

And the feature flags are vendor-declared. Treat any single flag, and any single price, as a claim to verify before you buy rather than a settled fact.