Re-pricing your client fees ahead of MTD 2027

• A fee review does not die in the client conversation. It dies in the diary, because it needs a clear week and the owner doing production never has one.
• Re-pricing is not a flat percentage applied to everyone. It is triage into three piles — leave alone, raise, let go — and the piles need different conversations.
• From 6 April 2027, anyone with qualifying self-employment or property income of £30,000 or more in the 2025-26 tax year has to move onto Making Tax Digital for Income Tax. That is a specific, defensible reason to reprice the clients it touches.
• The free week is five days with production covered by someone else, so the owner is not the person answering the phone.
• Worked example: 180 clients sorted into three groups, with the uplift illustrated on our own published seat rates.

Why the fee review never happens

Fees reviewed in bits, whenever someone complains about the price or a job obviously grows, drift out of line with the work. A proper review — sit down with the client list, look at fee against actual hours, decide what moves — needs an uninterrupted run at it. Half a day is not enough; you lose the thread every time the phone rings. A full week, with nothing else booked against it, is what it takes for a practice of any size.

That week never turns up on its own. Production work does not pause to let it happen, and an owner who is also doing bookkeeping, chasing records and preparing returns cannot simply decide to be unavailable for five days. So the review gets pushed to "after January", then to "after the April peak", then it is next January again and the fees are the same as they were two years ago while costs have not stood still.

The fix is not motivation. It is capacity. Cover the production for one week and the review happens, because the thing stopping it was never the will to do it.

What the free week requires

Not a quiet spell in the calendar — those are rare and unplannable. What it needs is someone else on the phones, the bank recs and the queries for five working days, so nothing in the owner's diary has to be them. A Production seat covers this directly: it is a named person doing the practice's processing work every week regardless, so having it run solo for one specific week costs nothing extra (back office, pricing).

Tell the team the week is coming, hand over anything that needs a decision before it starts, and set a rule for the week itself: nothing gets escalated unless it would wait until Monday anyway.

Triage before you touch a single fee

The mistake that turns a fee review into a string of awkward phone calls is treating every client the same way. Sort it into three piles first, and the conversations get much easier because each pile only needs one kind of conversation.

Clients to leave alone

Clients whose fee is close to what the work costs when your time is priced at its full rate. Raising these gains little and costs goodwill you may want later. Leave them and move on — the discipline here is resisting the urge to raise everyone by the same percentage because it feels tidier.

Clients to raise

Clients whose fee has fallen behind the work. This happens for ordinary reasons: turnover grew, a second bank account appeared, they added a subsidiary, or the fee was set five years ago and never moved while everything else did. Rank this pile by the size of the gap, not alphabetically, and work down it. The client who is £600 a year underpriced is worth the conversation before the client who is £60 underpriced.

Clients to let go

Clients who will not pay a fair price and never will, however the conversation is framed. Every practice has some. Count them by setting the hours spent against the fee charged. Underpriced clients also tend to be the ones who call the most. Letting five of these go can free more capacity than raising fifty other fees by ten pounds a month.

MTD for Income Tax's 2027 threshold drop

Making Tax Digital for Income Tax is already mandatory for sole traders and landlords with qualifying income above £50,000, from 6 April 2026. The threshold drops further on 6 April 2027: anyone with qualifying income of £30,000 or more for the 2025-26 tax year has to join from that date (gov.uk, find out if and when you need to use Making Tax Digital for Income Tax). Qualifying income is total turnover from self-employment and property before expenses, based on the return already filed for the year before.

That is a genuine change in the work for a specific, identifiable group: every sole trader and landlord client between roughly £30,000 and £50,000 of turnover moves from one self assessment return a year to digital record-keeping plus four quarterly updates a year, in MTD-compatible software. The fee that covered a single annual return does not cover four submissions and the bookkeeping discipline that quarterly reporting demands. Start the raise list with these clients. The increase is tied to a real change in what you are doing for them, and it is easy to explain in one sentence: "your return is becoming four returns, and the fee needs to reflect that."

Pull that list now, while April 2027 is still a plan. Practices that leave it until the quarter before are having the fee conversation and the conversation about moving them onto new software with the same client in the same month, which is a harder sell than doing them eighteen months apart.

A worked example with 180 clients

An illustration using our own published rates. A sole-practitioner book of 180 clients at an average fee of £1,250, triaged over one free week.

The headline fee total falls slightly. The fifteen clients who left were costing more in hours than they paid, so the practice is down £2,940 in billed fees and up in the hours those fifteen clients used to absorb — hours that now go to the seventy clients who just got a fair fee, or to the advisory work the practice was too stretched to offer them. Measured on the top line alone, the review looks like it failed. Measured on hours reclaimed against fee received, it worked. Put your own client count and average fee into the capacity calculator to see the shape of it for your practice.

How to have the conversation

• Lead with the reason. "Your work has grown" or "this is moving to quarterly reporting under MTD" lands better than a percentage out of nowhere.
• Give notice. A letter with the new fee starting at the next renewal. A call demanding an answer this week loses clients you wanted to keep.
• Do pile three by letter. Clients you are disengaging get a professional, brief notice period. Arguing invites the negotiation you have already decided not to have.
• Never do it in January. Fee reviews run in a production crush read as panic, however fair the number is. Run the free week outside the two busiest months in your calendar.
• Write the new fee down against the client file as well as in the letter. The point of the review is wasted if the number reverts to the old one the next time someone quotes from memory.

Where to start

Pull the client list first: everyone with turnover near the £30,000 to £50,000 MTD ITSA band, sorted by how underpriced they look against the hours they take. Then work out what a free week costs you in covered production hours with the capacity calculator, and read what a part-qualified costs if the alternative you are weighing is a UK hire. When you are ready to book the week, get in touch and we will cover production while you run the review. We muck in on the phones that week; you keep the pen on the fee.

Published 22 September 2026. Tax rules and rates change, so check current figures on gov.uk before relying on anything here. This is general information for practice owners and is not advice.