Felix & Co. AccountantsWe are a well-established and friendly accountancy firm based in London
Felix & Co. Accountants
If you haven’t told HMRC about some, or all, of your rental income, it is worth asking a harder question: how would HMRC actually find out? This free guide from Felix & Co Chartered Accountants explains where HMRC gets its information, the mistakes that quietly turn ordinary landlords into disclosure cases, and what to do before HMRC raises the question for you.
Prefer to talk it through first? Speak directly with a Chartered Certified Accountant about your rental income.
Book Your Free 15-Minute Consultation →It is a common assumption: if a landlord hasn’t told HMRC about their rental income, HMRC has no way of knowing. In reality, HMRC has access to an increasing range of data sources, and uses automated systems to cross-check them against the Self Assessment returns it already holds.
A property that appears to generate rental income, with no matching income declared, is exactly the kind of mismatch these systems are designed to flag.
Not necessarily. The absence of contact from HMRC does not mean rental income has been correctly reported, or that HMRC cannot investigate in the future. A disclosure made voluntarily, before HMRC identifies the issue, generally puts a landlord in a stronger position than waiting to be approached.
This guide walks through the six areas we see most often among landlords considering a Let Property Campaign disclosure:
A property generating a modest amount of monthly rent can feel too small to bother declaring. Over several years, however, even a modest sum adds up to a significant figure once HMRC’s review period is taken into account.
Adds up to £9,600 a year in rental income — before any expenses are even considered.
The same figure becomes £57,600 — a very different number to explain to HMRC after the fact.
The rules restricting mortgage interest relief for individual landlords, often referred to as “Section 24”, are one of the most misunderstood areas of residential property tax. For most individual landlords, finance costs can no longer be deducted directly from rental income. Instead, relief is given as a basic-rate tax reduction, applied after tax on rental profit has already been calculated.
For higher and additional rate taxpayers in particular, this can mean paying more tax overall than expected, even where nothing else about the property has changed — and it is a frequent source of undetected errors in landlords’ existing tax returns.
Felix & Co is a UK accountancy practice led by a Chartered Certified Accountant, working with landlords to review rental income, identify where reporting may have gone wrong, and prepare accurate, well-supported disclosures where needed. We handle the calculations, the paperwork and the correspondence with HMRC, so you can resolve the position with confidence rather than uncertainty.
Through data matching across sources including the Land Registry, letting agents, banks, mortgage lenders and information shared by overseas tax authorities, cross-checked automatically against the tax returns HMRC already holds.
Not necessarily. Tax deducted under the Non-Resident Landlord Scheme is generally a payment on account, not a final settlement. A Self Assessment return is normally still required to establish the correct final position.
Yes. This is a common situation. Information can often be reconstructed from bank statements, letting agent records, mortgage statements and previous tax returns.
This is often the effect of the Section 24 mortgage interest restriction, which changes how rental profit is taxed for individual landlords, particularly higher and additional rate taxpayers.
Possibly. The correct tax treatment depends on the legal and beneficial ownership position, and on whether the required elections or notifications were made to HMRC at the time.
Yes, with no obligation to use Felix & Co’s services afterwards.
Felix & Co Chartered Accountants · Belix House, 19 Raymill Road East, Maidenhead, SL6 8SW · 01895 348 097 · accounts@felixaccountants.com