A hand filling in paperwork on a desk, representing digital record keeping for tax

If you run a CL, a CS or a small touring park as a sole trader, there is a decent chance Making Tax Digital for Income Tax already applies to you and you have not fully clocked it yet. It went live for the first wave of self employed people and landlords on 6 April 2026, which means anyone with qualifying income over the threshold should already be keeping digital records and sending quarterly updates to HMRC rather than waiting until January to do one big tax return. This is a genuinely different way of working, not just a new form, and it catches campsite owners out because pitch income often sits alongside other income, so people who never thought of themselves as "digital record" candidates find themselves over the line without realising. Here is what it actually means, who it applies to, and how to get your site's records in shape without it eating your evenings.

What Making Tax Digital for Income Tax Actually Is

Making Tax Digital for Income Tax, usually shortened to MTD for Income Tax or MTD ITSA, replaces the old habit of totting everything up once a year for your Self Assessment return. Instead, once you are in the scheme, you keep digital records of your business income and expenses throughout the year, and send a summary to HMRC roughly every quarter using MTD compatible software. At the end of the tax year you submit a final declaration that pulls everything together, which replaces the old Self Assessment tax return for your business income. The record keeping has to be digital from the point income or expenses are recorded, so transferring a shoebox of receipts into a spreadsheet once a quarter does not meet the requirement on its own, the software needs to be doing the ongoing work.

Does It Apply to Your Campsite?

MTD for Income Tax applies to sole traders and landlords, based on your total qualifying income from self employment and property combined, not just your campsite takings in isolation. From 6 April 2026 it became mandatory for anyone whose qualifying income was over £50,000 in the relevant earlier tax year, and the threshold is set to drop further in the years after, bringing more small and medium sites into scope over time. This matters for campsite owners for two reasons. First, a lot of CL and CS operators run their site as a sole trader alongside another income stream, such as farming, letting out a static caravan, or a second self employed trade, and it is the combined total that counts. Second, sites that do not feel "big" on paper, a handful of pitches, seasonal storage, the odd rally weekend, can still tip over £50,000 in gross income once you add pitch fees, hookup charges and extras together across a full season. If your business operates through a limited company rather than as a sole trader, MTD for Income Tax does not apply to you in the same way, though it is always worth checking with your accountant which rules do.

What You Actually Have to Do

Once you are within the scope of MTD for Income Tax, there are three things you need in place:

None of the individual steps are complicated, but the quarterly cadence is the real change in habit. If you have been someone who gathers a carrier bag of paperwork every January and hands it to your accountant in one go, that approach stops working. You need a way of capturing pitch income, extras and outgoings as they happen throughout the season, not just at the quiet end of the year when you finally have time to sit down with it.

How This Is Different from Making Tax Digital for VAT

It is easy to conflate this with Making Tax Digital for VAT, which has applied to VAT registered businesses for several years and requires digital VAT returns regardless of turnover. MTD for Income Tax is separate and broader. It applies whether or not you are VAT registered, and it is based on your income tax position rather than your VAT position. A small CL well under the VAT threshold can still be squarely inside MTD for Income Tax if their combined qualifying income clears £50,000, while a larger VAT registered park with lower personal drawings from the business could, in theory, sit outside it. The two schemes run alongside each other, so if your site is already VAT registered you may end up managing both, which our guide to campsite VAT covers in more detail.

Getting Your Site's Records Digital Before It Bites

The good news is that campsite income is unusually well suited to going digital, because most of it already passes through a booking system or a card reader rather than being handed over as loose cash. A few practical steps make the transition much less stressful:

Keeping your invoicing and payments together in one place, rather than spread across a card machine, a booking app and a separate spreadsheet, means the quarterly figures HMRC wants are already sitting there waiting to be exported, instead of being reconstructed from memory every three months.

What Happens If You Ignore It

HMRC has built a points based penalty system for missed quarterly updates, so a single late submission is unlikely to be costly on its own, but persistent lateness builds up points that eventually trigger a fixed financial penalty, on top of the usual penalties for late payment of tax owed. The more disruptive cost, in practice, is the scramble it causes. Trying to reconstruct a quarter's worth of pitch income and expenses from memory and a pile of receipts a week before a deadline is a miserable way to spend an evening in what is probably already your busiest season. Getting your records digital and current is less about avoiding a fine and more about avoiding that particular kind of stress four times a year instead of once.

The Bottom Line

Making Tax Digital for Income Tax is now the reality for a good number of campsite owners, and the threshold is only going to bring more sites into scope over the next couple of years. If your combined income from your site and anything else you do is anywhere near £50,000, it is worth checking with your accountant now rather than finding out at the next deadline. The practical fix is the same whatever your situation: get pitch income, extras and expenses recorded digitally as they happen, keep it in one place, and quarterly updates become a five minute export rather than a dreaded exercise in memory and receipts.

If your booking, payment and invoicing records still live in three different places, it is worth bringing them together before your next quarterly deadline rolls round. Try CampSuite free and see what it looks like when your site's paperwork is ready for HMRC without the last minute scramble.