HMRC's latest Transformation Roadmap update has some genuinely striking numbers in it. The HMRC app had 7.6 million unique users in 2025-26 — up 28% on the year before — and was opened almost 100 million times in total. 5.6 million people used it specifically to check their pay before it landed, an average of 18 times each over the year. HMRC is targeting 10 million users by April 2027, and has also announced that from summer 2027 it will start moving over 100 types of personal tax letter online, cutting the roughly 120 million letters it posts out every year.
The direction of travel isn't subtle
Whatever you think of Making Tax Digital as a policy, the pattern behind it is now unmistakable: tax administration in the UK is moving to digital-by-default, and it's moving because people are actually choosing to use it, not just because it's being mandated. One in seven PAYE taxpayers has already used the app. HMRC's own letter volumes and call wait times are both falling as more gets handled online.
For business owners, the read-across is straightforward. If HMRC's own systems are built around real-time, digital, always-current data, then running your business's books from a shoebox of receipts and a spreadsheet updated once a quarter is going to feel increasingly out of step — and, more practically, is going to make each Making Tax Digital deadline harder than it needs to be. The businesses that find MTD easiest are the ones already working digitally as a matter of habit, not the ones trying to retrofit it in the final fortnight.
What "digital by default" looks like done properly
This is the whole case for Digital Accounting done through a platform like FreeAgent or Xero rather than bolted on at year-end: your numbers exist in one place, continuously, in a format that plugs straight into HMRC's digital requirements instead of needing translation. We've written before about what's actually changing and when under Making Tax Digital — worth a read if you haven't already moved, because the deadlines aren't moving to meet you.