HMRC will celebrate a massive tax take in January, say leading audit, tax and business advisory firm, Blick Rothenberg.
Robert Salter, a Director at the firm, said, “There will be no ‘January Blues’ for the revenue who will see a tax take boom due to the fast-approaching self-assessment deadline and trend of increasing tax receipts year on year.
“Millions of taxpayers will need to pay their 2024/25 tax bills before the 31st January self-assessment tax return filing deadline, boosting January’s tax take.
This is against the background of an overall rise in tax take year on year. HMRC’s latest statistics show total tax revenues for the 12 months to December 2025 increasing by over 7%, or in excess of £60bn, compared to the corresponding year to December 2024.”
He added, “Employers will pay taxable employee bonuses in the next 2-3 months. Meaning HMRC can look forward to several more months of booming tax receipts in the run up to the end of the tax year on 5th April 2026.”
“The cause of the overall increase in tax take is the impact of the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, direct tax rises, such as the increase in employer’s National Insurance Contributions (NIC) to 15% and ‘fiscal drag.’ This is the process whereby more and more taxpayers are pushed into ever higher rates of tax because of frozen tax bands and thresholds due to the impact of wage inflation rather than genuine, economic increases in their income.
“Due to these factors among others, the Government’s tax receipts for a 12-month period may actually exceed £1tn for the first time in the near future. They were approximately £910bn for the year to December 2025 and will certainly exceed that figure over the coming three months. But the increased inflation and increase in joblessness, which are both at least partly due to some of Rachel Reeves tax increases on employers will actually undermine her longer-term economic plans and could continue to leave the Government under pressure from a taxing and spending perspective.”
