Corporate report

HMRC performance update: April to June 2025

Published 14 August 2025

Purpose and priorities

HMRC is your tax service — we’re focused on realising our vision to be a trusted, modern tax and customs department, while acting with integrity, empathy and fairness in line with our Charter standards and Civil Service values.

Our core purpose is to bring in the revenue that funds the UK’s public services and ensure the customs system supports the smooth flow of trade at the border. Alongside our work to reduce the cost of administration for businesses and improve compliance, this helps create the conditions to support economic growth.

Our priorities are to close the tax gap, improve day-to-day performance and the customer experience, and drive reform and modernisation of the UK’s tax and customs system. These priorities are now embedded in our strategic objectives, and our transformation roadmap sets out the actions that will be taken to achieve our priorities and the changes that customers can expect to see.

Close the tax gap

We already bring in around 95% of the tax that’s due, according to the latest tax gap estimate (5.3% for 2023 to 2024) — and in 2024 to 2025 we brought in £48 billion of tax that would have gone unpaid if HMRC hadn’t stepped in (known as ‘compliance yield’), up from £41.8 billion the previous year and exceeding our target of £45.4 billion. In 2025 to 2026, our target is £50.4 billion and between April and June 2025 we brought in £9 billion of compliance yield.

Our compliance work contributed to record tax revenues of £875.9 billion in 2024 to 2025 — an increase of 3.9% on the previous year — money which is spent by the government on schools, the NHS, police and other essential services we all rely on. And following the investment announced at the Budget in October 2024 and the Spring Statement in March 2025, we’re modernising our systems and starting to recruit the new compliance and debt staff, who - alongside policy reforms — will help us deliver £7.5 billion of additional tax revenue, per year, by 2029 to 2030.

Recent investment in HMRC will also allow us to strengthen our counter-criminal technology and intelligence management, to tackle the most serious tax crime. Between April and June 2025, we achieved 132 positive charging decisions and 58 prosecutions brought as a result of our criminal investigations.

When customers owe taxes, duties, tax credits, penalties, charges, determinations or assessments to us, we call these amounts ‘receivables’ for accounting purposes (this becomes a debt if the amount owed becomes overdue and is not under appeal). At 31st March 2025, gross receivables amounted to £70.3 billion, compared to £63.1 billion at 31st March 2024. This figure includes our total debt balance — which was of £44.0 billion at the end of March 2025 but fell to £42.6 billion at the end of June 2025. Meanwhile, tax debt as a proportion of total tax receipts fell from 5.2% in 2023 to 2024, to 5.0% in 2024 to 2025 and we are determined to reduce it further.

Improve day-to-day performance and the overall customer experience

More customers are getting a better service by using our always-available digital services. They’re managing their tax affairs and resolving issues without having to wait on the phone. Between April and June 2025, 76.4% of interactions with customers were through automated or digital self-serve channels, while customer satisfaction for our digital services was 83.1%. Over 750,000 new users of the HMRC app were added between April and June 2025.

Customers like using our online services because we’ve focused on making them simpler, faster and available around the clock. We are expanding the range and type of digital services we provide — building towards 90% of customer interactions being automated or through digital self-serve channels by 2029 to 2030. As more customers self-serve online, our advisers have more time to support those with complex queries and people who need extra support.

Customers calling us have been receiving a better service, with calls answered quicker in the first quarter of 2025, compared to the same period 12 months ago. Between April and June 2025, 83.7% of callers who wanted to speak to an adviser had their call answered, up from 57.5% for the same period in 2024. We are getting closer to our service standard of 85%.

However, customers are waiting too long for responses to priority correspondence with 69.5% of customers getting a response within 15 days, against our service standard of 80%. During periods of high demand on our helplines, for example in quarter 1 and quarter 4 of the tax year, we look at how we can make the most efficient use of the resources available to us — such as moving staff from correspondence to handling calls. In quarter 1, this has led to a build-up of correspondence which we are now addressing. We have plans to manage new incoming correspondence alongside cases which we have previously received; and we are particularly targeting correspondence queues which we know are a priority for our customers.

Overall customers are happier with the service they are receiving from us. Satisfaction with our phone, webchat and digital services was 80.2% between April and June 2025, up from 78.5% for the same period in 2024 to 2025. Our service standard is 80%

Reform and modernisation of tax and customs administration

To continue improving the customer experience and close the tax gap, we need to reform and modernise tax and customs administration. In 2024 to 2025, we continued to transform our services and ways of working by investing in more resilient IT systems, further developing our digital services, and testing and using artificial intelligence solutions to further improve HMRC services. Our transformation roadmap, published in July 2025, outlines our ambitious plans to modernise and reform tax and customs administration and the actions that we will take.

Supporting wider government economic aims through HMRC’s work

We continue to support wider government aims, for example, by ensuring that everyone follows the rules and by protecting the system from those who seek to exploit it to gain an unfair advantage. Between April and June 2025, we recovered £29.4 million from the proceeds of crime and Code of Practice 9 civil investigations (read more about our Fraud Investigation Service’s work in our annual report technical note).