Insights
Practical writing on the tax, VAT, MTD, rating and compliance questions that come up on short-term let and holiday let portfolios — with the primary sources cited, and dated so you can see when we wrote it.
After 6 April 2025 the FHL regime is gone. This piece answers three reader questions: what happens to an existing pool, what qualifies when you replace items, and when a specialist review is worth commissioning.
From 6 April 2026 a combined £2.5m APR/BPR allowance applies to qualifying property at 100% relief, with 50% relief above. The allowance is transferable between spouses. STL properties themselves rarely qualify — eligibility, not the cap, is the first question for most owners.
A booking payout is not the same as booking income. Fees, refunds and adjustments change the amount that reaches the bank. This piece walks through the chart-of-accounts categories that let you see how a payout becomes income, and which costs belong to which property.
A substantial volume of UK fixed-rate mortgages come off through 2026-27, some of them held by STL landlords. Lender criteria on remortgage are typically tighter than those applied at original drawdown two, three or five years ago — interest rates higher, rental stress tests sharper, more questions asked. This is what the accounts and evidence pack should look like, and where a same-lender product transfer may sit alongside a full remortgage.
Every UK nation has raised the tax on additional-dwelling purchases in the last two years. This is what an operator now pays to acquire in England, Scotland or Wales, and the structural decisions to make before completion.
Post-FHL, most STL disposals face higher-rate CGT of 24% rather than the old 10% BADR rate that historically applied to FHL disposals. A narrow BADR route survives for operators whose FHL business genuinely ceased before 6 April 2025 (three-year transitional). Pre-sale accounting work is now decisive on both price and tax bill.
The tax gap between personal ownership and Ltd ownership has widened for higher-rate borrowing operators post-FHL. Retention vs extraction of profits, transition costs and future rate changes all matter. This is a model-dependent decision, not a rule of thumb.