MTD for Landlords: How to Report Property Income

If you let property, Making Tax Digital for Income Tax changes how you report your rents — but not what's taxable. This guide covers what counts, how multiple properties are grouped, and the wrinkles landlords ask about most: joint ownership and foreign property.

Are you in scope?

MTD for Income Tax applies to landlords whose gross qualifying income is over the threshold:

From	Gross income over
6 April 2026	£50,000
6 April 2027	£30,000
6 April 2028	£20,000

Two things landlords often get wrong:

• It's gross rent, not profit. The test is on rent received, before expenses and before mortgage interest.
• It's combined with self-employment. If you have a small trade and a rental, HMRC adds the two together to test the threshold.

How property is grouped under MTD

This is the key concept for landlords. You do not file a separate return per property. Instead:

• All your UK properties are combined into one UK property business. One quarterly update covers your entire UK portfolio.
• Foreign properties form a separate business source, with their own quarterly update.

So a landlord with three UK flats and a villa in Spain has two property income sources to report — not four. You still keep the income and expenses per property in your records; you just report the combined totals per business.

What goes in a property quarterly update

Each quarter you report your year-to-date (cumulative) property income and expenses:

• Income — total rents received across the property business.
• Expenses — allowable running costs: repairs and maintenance, letting and management fees, insurance, ground rent, service charges, and so on.

As with self-employment, you can report consolidated expenses (a single figure) if you're under the turnover threshold, or itemised categories.

Mortgage interest note: for residential lets, finance costs aren't a straight deduction — they're given as a basic-rate tax reducer. You don't need to solve this in the quarter; it's handled in the calculation at the final declaration. Just keep your interest figures recorded.

Jointly owned property

Very common, and simpler than people fear:

You report only your share. Own a property 50/50 with a spouse? You each report 50% of the rent and 50% of the expenses in your own MTD updates.

Each owner also tests their own share against the MTD threshold. So a jointly owned portfolio might put one owner in scope and not the other, depending on their overall income. (A genuine property partnership is treated differently and is currently outside the first MTD phases — but ordinary joint ownership is not a partnership.)

Foreign property

Foreign lets are reported as a separate property business. You'll capture income per country and may need to handle things like foreign tax paid and any relief — details that come together at the final declaration. Keep good records of amounts in the local currency and the rate you used.

A practical routine for landlords

1. Record rents and costs digitally as they happen, tagged to each property.
2. Each quarter, total up your UK portfolio (and any foreign portfolio separately) and file the cumulative figures.
3. At year-end, finalise, apply the finance-cost relief and any allowances, add your other income, and make the final declaration.

Where ThisQuarter fits. ThisQuarter supports UK property and foreign property as distinct income sources, keeps your data encrypted on your own machine, and files quarterly updates and the final declaration straight to HMRC. See how it works.

The bottom line

Group your UK properties into one business, foreign into another, report your own share of anything jointly owned, and file cumulative figures each quarter. The tax treatment of your rents hasn't changed — only the rhythm of reporting has.