The Other New Year

On the first day of Michaelmas term, the judges of England and Wales process from Westminster Abbey to Westminster Hall in full ceremonial dress, having attended a service asking for guidance in the year ahead. They are then given the Lord Chancellor's Breakfast.

The Lord Chancellor's Breakfast is not a breakfast. It is a reception, held late in the morning, and it has not involved anyone eating breakfast for a very long time. The name survives because the ceremony it belongs to survives, and the ceremony survives because it has been happening since roughly the fourteenth century, when the judges genuinely did go to Mass and genuinely were then fed.

This year it falls on Thursday 1 October.

The Bar gets two new years

Most of the country has one, in January, and treats it as the moment to look at money. Resolutions, ISA deadlines, pension top-ups, the annual promise to be better organised.

For the self-employed Bar, January is the single worst month in which to attempt any of that. The Self Assessment deadline is on the 31st, the balancing payment and the first payment on account land the same day, and this year the third quarterly MTD update follows a week later on 7 February. Accountants are unreachable. Clerks are dealing with a fresh term. Nobody is thinking clearly about pension contributions while working out what they owe.

October is better. It is a genuine reset in this profession, everyone around you is treating it as the start of something, and crucially it is early enough that the decisions you make can still affect the year they belong to.

What's actually in the diary

5 October is the one with a penalty attached. Anyone who started in practice during the 2025/26 tax year, which means most people who took tenancy last October, has to tell HMRC by this date that a return is due. This is registration, not filing, and it applies to first-time filers. Miss it and you are into failure-to-notify territory, which is a penalty based on the tax at stake rather than a flat fee.

New tenants are the group this catches, every year, largely because pupillage income was handled differently and nobody mentions that the rules have changed underneath them.

5 October is also when the second MTD quarter closes, covering 6 July to 5 October.

31 October is the paper filing deadline for the 2025/26 return. Most people file online and can ignore it.

7 November is when that second quarterly update is due. If the first one in August was a scramble, this is the one that tells you whether the bookkeeping has actually been fixed or merely survived.

30 December matters only if you have PAYE income alongside your practice and want tax collected through your code.31 January is the 2025/26 return, the balancing payment, and the first payment on account for 2026/27, all at once.

7 February is the third quarterly update, seven days later.

The part that isn't a deadline

By the end of the first week of October you will have two quarters of actual figures for 2026/27. Not estimates, not last year's shape, but real income and expenditure for six months of the current tax year.

That has not been available to the Bar before, and it is the most useful thing MTD has accidentally produced.

It means a pension contribution can be sized in October against something close to reality, rather than guessed at in March or regretted in January. If you are near the tapered annual allowance, and at a commercial set you may well be, a half-year figure tells you roughly which side of it you are heading for. If you have unused allowance to carry forward from earlier years, October is when you can still do something about it in an orderly way.

It also means the tax reserve can be checked against what is actually coming rather than against a rule of thumb. If the January bill is going to be larger than last year, finding that out in October gives you three months. Finding out in January gives you three weeks.

One for the juniors

From April 2027 the MTD threshold falls from £50,000 to £30,000 of gross income. That pulls in a substantial part of the junior end of the Bar who are currently outside it and may reasonably assume this is a problem for other people.

If that is you, the year to get your records into recognised software is this one, while there is no obligation and no penalty for getting it wrong.

Michaelmas

The judges will process, the service will be held, and the Lord Chancellor will give a breakfast that is not a breakfast. It is a good deal of ceremony to mark the beginning of a working year.

The ceremony is the point, though. Marking a beginning is what makes people behave as though something has begun. The Bar is unusual in having a new year that arrives when there is still time to do something with it, which is more than can be said for January.

This article is general information based on legislation and HMRC's published deadlines at the date of publication, both of which may change. It is not advice, and individual circumstances differ. Anyone unsure whether they need to register for Self Assessment, or when their first quarterly update is due, should take specific advice from an accountant familiar with the Bar's receipts basis.

Altor Wealth Management LLP advises barristers and other self-employed professionals from our offices in Hook, Hampshire, and across Surrey, Berkshire, Sussex and Kent.