CHECKLIST
Year-End Checklist for Landlords
About eighty minutes, and the first twenty five have to happen before 5 April rather than after it. Property income is taxed on the tax year, everything in the opening section stops being available the moment the date passes, and everything after it is recording what already happened.
- Five sections, twenty checks, eighty minutes
- The repairs, write-offs and transfers that expire on 5 April
- The finance cost reduction worked properly, carry forward included
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Who this checklist is for
Landlords approaching 5 April who want the decisions made while they are still available, rather than reported on afterwards by an accountant who can only tell you what you did.
You have repairs planned for the spring
A repair before the date reduces this year’s tax. The same repair a week later waits a full year for its relief. The same timing logic covers replacing domestic items, writing off rent you will never collect, and a pension contribution, which can pull rental profit back out of higher rate. None of these work retrospectively.
You are taxed on more rent than you were paid
Probably correct, and worth checking rather than assuming. Property income is usually taxed as it arises, so rent owed to you at 5 April still counts. The relief is that a genuinely irrecoverable debt is deductible, so the year end is when arrears get a decision: chase it properly, or write it off and take the deduction now.
You have never tracked your unrelieved interest
Where profits capped the basic rate reduction in an earlier year, the unused finance costs carried forward, and they only relieve a later year if someone knows the balance. The checklist works the reduction as the lower of three amounts, adds what was brought forward, and records what carries on.
FACTS
The two figures to have before January
Your tax on the property, and the share of rent it represents. On £24,000 of rent with £4,000 of costs and £15,000 of interest, a higher rate landlord owes £3,946 on a real profit of £5,000. That is most of what the property actually made, and January is the wrong month to find it out.
20 checks
Five sections
80 minutes
Twenty five of them before the date
FACTS
What April 2027 does to the same figures
Property income moves to its own rates of 22, 42 and 47 per cent, two points above the main rates at every band. The final section runs this year’s figures at those rates, because raising the reserve now is easier than finding the difference later. The payment dates stay 31 January and 31 July.