30 September – Massive deadline for R&D Tax Relief Claimants
In the last few years, there have been some massive changes to R&D Tax Relief. One of them has a looming deadline for around 20-25% (I’m guessing, but it’s an educated guess given it is the end of the corporate tax year) of businesses that might be considering a claim.
If your company had a financial year end of 31 March 2026, and you haven’t claimed R&D Tax Relief before or you haven’t submitted a claim on an original return that was filed between 1st October 2023 and 30th September 2026, then you will need to notify HMRC of your intention to claim, by 30th September 2026.
If you don’t your claim won’t be accepted. It’s also not a fixed deadline as it will be relevant for every month going forward so a 30th April 2026 year-end will need to pre-notify by 30th October 2026 and 31st December 2026 year-end by 30th June 2027.
If you have a 31 March 2026 year end and you think you might be considering a claim, then you really need to make sure you have pre-notified HMRC by 30th September 2026.
The rules are further complicated by disallowing a claim made on an amended tax return (a second filing) to include an R&D Claim that was submitted in the period between 1st October 2023 and 30th September 2024. So, if you filed an amended claim for 31st March 2022 after 1st October 2023 and you haven’t submitted another claim, you will need to pre-notify HMRC.
Confused? We were!
Not sure where to start? Well you can try here, but it doesn’t reference the disallowing of amended R&D Claims, so if you’re still not sure or if you don’t have access to your online tax account, why not send us an e-mail or give us a call and we can help you with that. You don’t even have to use us for your R&D claim.
We’ll have a quick chat about your projects, we’ll need a bit of information about the business, some dates and names and reference numbers and we’ll prepare and submit your notification form.
You may subsequently decide not to prepare a claim, or you might ask us to prepare a claim and in our more detailed look at your projects, we might say there isn’t scope for a claim as your projects don’t meet the requirements, or there isn’t sufficient cost to make it viable for either of us.
But if you haven’t notified HMRC by the same date in September 2026 as your March 2026 year end, all will be lost!
