Corporate report

HMRC performance update 2025 to 2026: quarter 3

Published 12 February 2026

Purpose and priorities

HMRC’s core purpose is to collect the money that pays for the UK’s public services and give financial support to people. The impact of our work is felt across the whole of society. From importers and exporters trading across the border through our increasingly flexible, resilient, customs system, to families getting the financial support they need through Child Benefit and Tax-Free Childcare — we’re helping to build an economy that works for everyone.

Our priorities are to:

• close the tax gap
• improve day-to-day performance and the customer experience
• drive reform and modernisation of tax and customs administration

These priorities are embedded in our strategic objectives, along with building a high-performing organisation with a skilled and engaged workforce and supporting wider government economic aims. We are working hard to deliver them, while acting with kindness, empathy and integrity — in line with our Charter standards and Civil Service values.

Our Transformation Roadmap, published in July 2025, outlines our ambitious plans to modernise and reform tax and customs administration. And we are listening to our customers and collaborating closely with our partners, to co-design and deliver the necessary changes to create a system that works better for everyone.

Close the Tax Gap

We continue to collect and protect billions of pounds of tax that would have gone unpaid if HMRC hadn’t stepped in (known as ‘compliance yield’). In 2025 to 2026 so far, we have delivered £24.2 billion of compliance yield and our target for the year of £50.4 billion is within our forecast delivery range. Our full year performance will be set out in our Annual Report and Accounts.

To go further and faster in closing the tax gap in this Parliament, the government has announced a series of measures to deliver £10 billion of additional tax revenue, per year, by 2029 to 2030. Much of this additional tax revenue is from new government investment enabling us to modernise our systems, as well as recruiting and training an additional 5,500 compliance caseworkers over the next five years alongside lawyers, analysts, and policy experts. We are on track, having recruited over 1,500 additional compliance staff so far. To enhance our capacity to collect outstanding tax debts, recent investment allows us to retain around 1,200 current debt management staff until March 2030 and we have started recruiting a further 1,200. Most of these new recruits will join us by the end of 2026 to 2027.

Other measures announced at Autumn Budget 2025 include a strengthened reward scheme for informants who provide valuable information to help tackle high-value avoidance or evasion, improving how HMRC collects and uses data to help customers get their tax right first time, increasing the use of in-system data-driven nudges to reduce errors when submitting tax returns and introducing powers to tackle those that knowingly engage fraudulent businesses within the Construction Industry Scheme.

To tackle the most serious tax crime and protect revenue for the exchequer, between October and December 2025, our criminal investigations enabled 103 positive charging decisions and 46 prosecutions to be brought. Recent investment will allow us to further strengthen our counter-criminal technology and intelligence management.

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 November’s update to our tax debt strategy shows how we aim to deliver sustained, year-on-year reductions in tax debt as a proportion of receipts up to 2030. The total debt balance was £44.0 billion at the end of December 2025, compared with £44.3 billion at the same point in 2024. 

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

More customers are getting a better service by using our digital services to manage their tax affairs and resolve issues — without having to call or write to us — something our customers really value. So, we are working to enable customers to do more digitally by expanding our services, aiming for a minimum of 90% of customer interactions being through automated or digital self-serve channels by 2029 to 2030.

Between October and December 2025, 79.6% of customer interactions with HMRC were through automated or digital self-serve channels (up from 78.1% for the same period in 2024 to 2025, and up from 73.2% in 2023 to 2024), and 81.9% of respondents said they were either satisfied or very satisfied after using them. Self Assessment returns for the 2024 to 2025 tax year were due to be submitted by midnight on the 31st of January, with HMRC receiving 11.48 million returns by the deadline, 97.25% of which were filed online.

There have been 112.3 million customer sessions on our highly rated HMRC app so far in 2025 to 2026, with over 680,000 new users added between October and December 2025, taking the total number using it for the first time to 2.1 million since April. By the end of December 2025, we had seen 95.8 million user sessions in Personal Tax Accounts and 33.0 million in Business Tax Accounts. You can download the HMRC app following these instructions, or you can sign in or set up a Personal Tax Account or Business Tax Account.

As more customers interact with us digitally, our advisers have more time to support people who need to call us because they have complex queries or need extra help. Between October and December 2025, 85.0% of callers who wanted to speak to an adviser had their call answered, meeting our service standard, and year-to-date performance to the end of December 2025 was 84.2%.

The average waiting time for customers calling us between October and December 2025 was under 14 minutes. Since the beginning of April, customers have waited an average of 13 minutes and 37 seconds for their call to be answered. This is an improvement from over 18 minutes at the same point in 2024, and a further improvement compared to April 2024, when it was broadly double compared to today, at over 28 minutes. We recognise that some customers are still waiting too long, however, particularly during peak periods of customer contact. Further improvement is a priority for us.

Customer response times for priority correspondence have continued to improve through the year, and 86.0% of customers received a response within 15 working days between October and December 2025. This is up from 82.2% in quarter 2 (July to September 2025) and takes our year-to-date performance to 78.6%.

Most customers continue to be satisfied with the service they are receiving from us. Satisfaction with our phone, webchat and digital services was 79.2% between October and December 2025 with our year-to-date performance over the first 9 months of 2025 to 2026 at 79.8%. This is slightly below our target of 80%.

Reform and modernisation of tax and customs administration

To improve the customer experience and close the tax gap, we will continue reforming and modernising tax and customs administration. We are delivering changes all the time, in line with our Transformation Roadmap.

Between October and December 2025, we continued our work to improve the services we offer to customers and make our IT estate more resilient and secure, progressing procurements for HMRC’s new Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) and Enterprise Customer Relationship Management (ECRM) platforms. These programmes will replace legacy systems with cloud‑based platforms to provide a 360-degree view of customer journeys and contact across phone, email, webchat and social media. We also continue to invest in how we store and connect data, bringing together datasets to allow our teams to build more effective risk models — supporting our work to close the tax gap.

As part of the government’s business rate reforms, customers can now view their draft April 2026 valuations (published by the Valuation Office Agency (VOA) in November 2025), use an estimator tool for 2026 to 2027 and — for the first time — see three comparable properties to understand how their rateable value was calculated.

Supporting wider government economic aims through HMRC’s work

As the UK’s tax and customs authority, we play an essential role in ensuring the customs system supports the smooth flow of trade at the border, supporting economic growth. We are delivering enhancements to our systems, for example upgrading the New Computerised Transit System (NCTS), which enables the UK to maintain transit as a reliable and efficient goods movement option for businesses that routinely move goods into, out of, and through the UK.

As well as supporting business and trade, we play a vital role in giving individuals and families financial support to help with the cost of living, for example through Child Benefit and Tax-Free Childcare. We recognise the manner in which we expanded some of our Child Benefit compliance controls to protect taxpayers from error and fraud impacted some of our customers, for which HMRC has apologised. A leading cause of Child Benefit error and fraud continues to be unreported changes to a customer’s residency status, and we have taken swift action to improve processes using international travel data, including reinstating employment checks using PAYE. We will no longer be suspending payments at the outset of an enquiry and instead give customers at least one month before any payments are paused.