Accountant for Childminders: What Your First Year Actually Looks Like

Your first year of childminding runs on four dates, and only one of them is set by you. You register with your inspectorate before a child crosses your doorstep. You start minding. You tell HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) by the 5 October after the end of the tax year in which you started. You file your first tax return and pay the tax by the following 31 January. Everything else in this page hangs off that sequence, because most of what goes wrong for new childminders is a date missed rather than a number miscalculated.

Your first year as a childminder, in order

Take a childminder who takes her first mindee in June 2026. Here is the whole first cycle.

When	What happens
Before your first child	Registration with Ofsted in England, Care Inspectorate Wales, the Care Inspectorate in Scotland, or your local Health and Social Care Trust in Northern Ireland. Fees, Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) checks and required training all sit here, and all of it is deductible once you trade.
June 2026	You start minding. Your trade has begun, which is what the tax rules care about. Start keeping records now: fees in, costs out, hours worked, business miles driven.
5 April 2027	End of the 2026/27 tax year. Your first period of trading closes here regardless of when in the year you started.
5 October 2027	Deadline to tell HMRC you are self-employed and register for self assessment. You can do it the week you start instead, and it is easier that way.
31 January 2028	First online return filed and the tax paid. If your bill is over £1,000, a first payment on account for the next year is due on the same day.

Miss the 31 January filing date and there is an automatic £100 penalty even when no tax is owed, with daily penalties after three months. That is the entire reason the timeline comes first on this page.

Is childminding self-employment?

It is. You choose your hours, set your fees, take your own bookings and work from your own home, which puts you squarely in business on your own account. That makes you a sole trader for tax, and it means two charges on your profit rather than one: income tax at your marginal rate, and Class 4 National Insurance at 6% on profits between £12,570 and £50,270, then 2% above that. Those thresholds and that rate were locked at their 2025/26 values and were still current when this page was checked in August 2026. Class 2 National Insurance stopped being a separate charge from 6 April 2024, so if anyone tells you to set up a weekly Class 2 direct debit, they are working from an old script.

Registration with your inspectorate is a childcare requirement and has nothing to do with your tax status. Being registered does not make you employed, and minding without registration would not make you untaxed.

The £1,000 trading allowance, and when it lets you off entirely

The first £1,000 of gross trading income in a tax year is covered by the trading allowance. Gross means the fees before you take anything off, not your profit. A childminder with one child two afternoons a week at £6 an hour, over a school year, is genuinely in this territory, and nobody in this corner of the internet ever says so.

If your gross fees for the tax year are £1,000 or less, the income is covered and you do not have to register with HMRC for it. Above £1,000 you register by the 5 October and then choose, each year, between deducting the flat £1,000 or deducting your actual costs. Never both. For any childminder minding properly, actual costs will beat £1,000 comfortably, so the allowance is mostly relevant to the very small starter year and to the person testing whether they want to do this at all.

The costs childminding actually puts on you

These are the ones specific to this trade, all deductible against your fees:

• Inspectorate registration and annual fees.
• DBS checks for you and for every household member aged 16 or over.
• Paediatric first aid, safeguarding and early years training, plus renewals.
• Public liability insurance, and any car insurance loading for business use.
• Membership of the Professional Association for Childcare and Early Years (PACEY) or a similar body, and its support line.
• Toys, books, craft materials, safety gates, high chairs, cots and outdoor play equipment. Larger and longer-lasting items count as capital and come through capital allowances rather than as a straight expense, which usually still gives full relief in the year you buy.
• Food and drink provided to the children, nappies, wipes and consumables.
• A share of your household running costs, which has its own rules and its own page below.

Mileage: the rate that changed on 6 April 2026

School runs, nursery drop-offs, the trip to playgroup and the run to buy craft supplies are all business travel. From 6 April 2026 the approved rate is 55p per business mile for the first 10,000 miles in the tax year, then 25p. The 45p figure still printed on most childminding pages applied from 2011/12 through to 2025/26 and is wrong for the current year, which is worth checking any adviser on before you hire them.

One rule catches people out: the flat rates stick to the vehicle. Once you have claimed the approved mileage rates for a particular car, you have to keep using them for that car for as long as you use it in the business. You cannot claim 55p a mile one year and a proportion of your actual fuel, servicing and insurance the next. Keep a simple log of date, journey and miles; a note in your phone is enough as long as it is contemporaneous.

Which rulebook your household claims sit under

Household costs are where childminding tax gets genuinely different, and where the answer forks. Outside Making Tax Digital for Income Tax (MTD for Income Tax) the long-standing HMRC agreement gives you a 10% of childminding income deduction for wear and tear on household items plus hours-based percentages of your heating, lighting and council tax. Inside MTD for Income Tax those agreed percentages fall away and you claim the actual business proportion of what you spend instead. MTD for Income Tax phases in by qualifying income, starting from April 2026, so most sole-trader childminders are outside it for now and will be pulled in later. Which side of that line you are on decides how you claim, so we have given it a page of its own: childminder expenses, wear and tear and MTD works through both regimes with the percentages and the turnover thresholds. If you want the wider timetable first, our MTD for Income Tax April 2026 deadline page has it.

Bev's year: from gross fees to the tax she pays

Bev is a registered childminder in Lancaster. This is her 2026/27 year, and every figure below comes from something stated on this page or on the expenses page linked above, so you can redo it with your own numbers.

Line	Amount
Gross fees from parents, 2026/27	£26,400
Business mileage: 1,200 miles at 55p (2026/27 rate)	(£660)
Registration and annual fees, DBS checks, first aid training, insurance, PACEY membership	(£1,140)
Food, consumables, toys and equipment, plus her household-cost and wear and tear claim	(£6,600)
Taxable profit	£18,000

Her total costs are £660 plus £1,140 plus £6,600, which is £8,400. Take that off £26,400 and her profit is £18,000. Now the two charges:

• Income tax. £18,000 less the £12,570 personal allowance leaves £5,430 taxed at the 20% basic rate. That is £1,086.
• Class 4 National Insurance. The same £5,430 sits between £12,570 and £50,270, charged at 6%. That is £325.80.
• Total due for 2026/27: £1,411.80, payable by 31 January 2028.

Because that total is above £1,000 and almost none of it was collected at source, Bev also starts payments on account: two instalments of half the bill, £705.90 each, due 31 January 2028 and 31 July 2028 against her 2027/28 liability. So the cheque she writes on 31 January 2028 is £1,411.80 plus £705.90, which is £2,117.70. Two liabilities land on one date, and it catches almost every new sole trader once. It is the reason to set money aside from your first month rather than your first return. The £12,570 allowance, the 20% band and the 6% Class 4 rate used here were all locked at 2025/26 values and still current when this page was checked in August 2026.

Change one thing and the arithmetic follows. If Bev's fees were £34,000 with the same £8,400 of costs, her profit would be £25,600, taxed on £13,030 above the allowance: £2,606 of income tax and £781.80 of Class 4.

What a childminding accountant is actually for

Search for a childminder accountant and you will find a handful of firms that specialise, and a great many that will happily take the work. Honest answer first: a childminder with two mindees, one car and a shoebox of receipts can file their own return, and many do. The point at which paying someone starts to pay for itself is usually one of these:

• Your income is approaching the threshold that pulls you into MTD for Income Tax, and you need to know when and what changes.
• You have employment income or a partner's business alongside the minding, and the interaction matters.
• You have spent seriously on equipment or on adapting a room, and want the capital allowances handled properly.
• Your household-cost claim is large enough that using the wrong method costs more than a fee.
• You have not filed for a couple of years and want it straightened out before HMRC asks.

Whoever you pick, ask two questions before you sign: what mileage rate applies to your business miles this tax year, and what happens to the 10% wear and tear deduction once you are inside MTD for Income Tax. A firm that gets both right has read the guidance this year. A firm that quotes you 45p has not.

How we work with childminders

Holloway Davies handles sole-trader childminders on the same footing as any other small trade: your records in whatever shape you keep them, the return prepared and filed, the household-cost method chosen deliberately rather than by habit, and a clear number for what to put aside each month. If you run a nursery or preschool with staff on payroll and funded hours coming in from the local authority, that is a different set of problems and a different page. If you are minding on your own account from your own home, this is the one.

We do not advise on childcare registration, ratios or safeguarding: your inspectorate and your membership body are the right people for that. We deal with what registration costs you and how it lands on your tax return.

Related reading: what a self assessment accountant does, HMRC late filing penalties, and if you also tutor on the side, accountants for tutors.