VAT Registration Threshold Checker
The VAT registration threshold is £90,000 of taxable turnover, and HMRC applies it on a rolling 12-month basis, not your accounting year. Miss the month you cross it and the late-registration bill lands on you, not your customers. Enter your figures below to run both statutory tests, see the month you breach (or are projected to breach), and get the exact date you must register by and the date VAT starts applying to your sales.
VAT Registration Threshold Checker
The VAT registration threshold is £90,000 of taxable turnover, and HMRC applies it on a rolling 12-month basis, not your accounting year. Miss the month you cross it and the late-registration bill lands on you, not your customers. Enter your figures below to run both statutory tests, see the month you breach (or are projected to breach), and get the exact date you must register by and the date VAT starts applying to your sales.
Total VAT-taxable sales (standard, reduced and zero-rated) for the 12 full months just ended, excluding VAT. Do not include exempt or outside-scope income here, or enter it and use the exclusion field below.
Your most recent full month. Used with the growth rate to project the rolling total forward and find the breach month.
Month-on-month change in turnover. Leave at 0 if trading is flat.
The separate forward-look test: if you expect more than £90,000 of taxable turnover in the next 30 days by itself (a single large contract, for example), you must register immediately.
Rent from exempt property lettings, insurance, financial services, income from outside the UK VAT scope. These do not count towards the threshold and are stripped out before the test.
The projection assumes your growth rate holds. Check the rolling total at the end of every month from now on: the 30-day clock starts the moment a month-end total exceeds £90,000. If the breach is a one-off spike you expect to reverse, you can ask HMRC for an exception from registration.
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How the two VAT registration tests work
There are two separate tests, and failing either one triggers compulsory registration. The rolling 12-month test: at the end of every calendar month, total your VAT-taxable turnover for the 12 months just ended. If it exceeds £90,000 (the threshold since 1 April 2024), you must notify HMRC within 30 days of the end of that month, and you are registered from the first day of the second month after the breach. The 30-day forward test: if at any point you expect taxable turnover in the next 30 days alone to exceed £90,000, you must register before the end of that 30-day period, and registration takes effect from the date the expectation arose. Only taxable turnover counts: standard, reduced and zero-rated sales. Exempt supplies (residential rent, insurance, most financial services) and income outside the scope of UK VAT are excluded.
Worked example 1, the rolling test. A design consultancy totals its taxable sales at the end of July 2026 and the 12 months to 31 July come to £91,200. The breach month is July 2026. It must notify HMRC by 30 August 2026 (30 days after the month end) and it is registered for VAT from 1 September 2026, the first day of the second month after the breach. Every sale from 1 September carries VAT, and its first VAT return period starts on that date.
Worked example 2, the 30-day forward test. A contractor trading at £4,000 a month signs a single £95,000 fit-out contract on 4 May 2026, payable within the month. From that date it expects more than £90,000 of taxable turnover in the next 30 days alone, so the forward test is failed immediately. It must register by 3 June 2026, and registration is effective from 4 May 2026, the day the expectation arose. There is no two-month grace here: the contract itself is invoiced with VAT.
The checker projects your breach month by rolling your latest month forward at your growth rate while dropping the equivalent back-projected month off the other end of the window. Treat a projected date as an early-warning system, not a filing date: the statutory clock only starts when a real month-end total actually crosses the line, so keep totalling the trailing 12 months every month once you are within roughly £10,000 of the threshold.
Frequently asked questions
- What is the VAT registration threshold for 2026/27?
- £90,000 of taxable turnover in any rolling 12-month period. It was raised from £85,000 on 1 April 2024 and has not changed since. The test is a rolling 12 months measured at each month end, not your accounting year or the tax year, which is the single most common way businesses miss a breach.
- What counts as taxable turnover for the threshold?
- All standard-rated, reduced-rated and zero-rated sales, excluding VAT itself. Zero-rated sales count even though the rate is 0%. Exempt supplies (residential letting, insurance, most financial services), income outside the scope of UK VAT, and the sale of capital assets are excluded. If a chunk of your income is exempt, strip it out before testing, this checker has a field for exactly that.
- When am I actually registered after crossing the threshold?
- Under the rolling 12-month test you must notify HMRC within 30 days of the end of the month you crossed, and registration takes effect from the first day of the second month after the breach. Breach in July, notify by 30 August, registered from 1 September. Under the 30-day forward test there is no grace period: registration is effective from the date you first expected to exceed £90,000 within 30 days.
- What happens if I register late?
- HMRC backdates your registration to the date it should have started, and you owe the VAT on everything you sold from that date, whether or not you charged it to customers. On top sits a failure-to-notify penalty of up to 30% of the VAT due for careless lateness, and more if HMRC considers it deliberate. If you crossed the threshold months ago, register now and take advice on the disclosure, the penalty position improves sharply when you come forward unprompted.
- I went over the threshold temporarily. Do I still have to register?
- You can ask HMRC for an exception from registration if you can evidence that the breach was a one-off and your taxable turnover for the next 12 months will stay below the deregistration threshold of £88,000. Write to HMRC within the same 30-day notification window with your figures and the reason for the spike. HMRC must agree; you cannot simply decide the exception applies yourself.
- Is registering voluntarily below the threshold ever worth it?
- Often, yes. If your customers are VAT-registered businesses they reclaim the VAT you charge, so it costs them nothing, while you reclaim input VAT on your own costs, equipment and pre-registration purchases (up to 4 years back for goods still on hand, 6 months for services). If you sell to consumers, registration makes you 20% more expensive or cuts your margin, so most consumer-facing businesses wait until they must. Once registered, you can deregister if taxable turnover falls below £88,000.
Numbers are one thing. Getting the timing right is another.
Every figure here is modelled on standard 2026/27 thresholds. Your actual position depends on prior-year usage, pension carry-forward, other income sources, and how your decisions interact with each other. We build those models as part of our advisory work.
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