New UK Tax Year Checklist 2026/27: 7 Things to Do Now Your Allowances Have Reset

The new UK tax year started on 6 April. Most people don't notice. The ones who do tend to be the same ones who, twelve months later, have a fully topped-up ISA, a pension that's actually on track, and a clear sense of how their net worth has moved over the year.

It's not a coincidence. The first few weeks of a new tax year are quietly the most valuable financial weeks of the calendar — your allowances reset, your pension annual allowance refreshes, and you get a fresh starting point to measure progress against. Use them well and the next twelve months get a head start. Ignore them and you'll be doing the same scramble most people do every March, trying to use a year's worth of allowances in the final week.

This guide walks through what you should actually do in the first few weeks of the 2026/27 tax year. It's not a year-long financial plan — it's a checklist for now. Twenty minutes today saves a panicked weekend next April.

First, the quick refresher: what just reset on 6 April

Before the checklist, here's what's actually changed. The UK tax year runs from 6 April to 5 April the following year, so on 6 April 2026 a new set of annual allowances came back into force. These are use-it-or-lose-it: anything you don't use by 5 April 2027 is gone (with one important exception for pensions — more on that below).

The numbers haven't changed dramatically from last year, but the CGT and dividend allowances are now a fraction of what they were three years ago. Both have been quietly cut, which means more ordinary investors are paying tax on gains they used to keep — and ISAs have become more important than ever.

Now, the checklist.

1. Use this year's ISA allowance early, not late

This is the single highest-leverage move you can make in the first few weeks of the tax year, and almost nobody does it. Most people who use their ISA allowance at all use it in March, in a last-minute panic, because that's when "use it or lose it" kicks in.

The problem with the March approach is that you give up an entire year of tax-free growth. If you put £20,000 into a Stocks & Shares ISA in April rather than the following March, and the market returns 8% over the year, you've earned roughly £1,600 of tax-free growth that wouldn't have happened otherwise. Do it for ten years and the gap compounds into something serious.

Why it matters: Tax-free growth is one of the few genuinely free things in personal finance. Every day your money sits outside the ISA wrapper is a day it's exposed to tax it didn't need to be.

How to do it: If you have cash sitting in a savings account that you've already earmarked for investing, move it now. You don't have to pick funds the same day — most platforms let you park it as cash inside the ISA wrapper while you decide. The decision that matters is getting it into the wrapper, not what you buy with it.

If you can't fund the full £20,000 in one go (most people can't), set up a standing order. £1,667 a month will fully fund a £20,000 ISA over the year. Even £200 a month is meaningfully better than nothing — and starting in April rather than September means an extra five months of compounding.

A quick note on Cash ISAs versus Stocks & Shares ISAs: if you'll need the money within five years, cash usually makes more sense because the stock market can be down when you need it. Beyond five years, the historical case for stocks is overwhelming. Pick the wrapper that matches the timeline of the goal you're saving for.

One thing that makes this year different: 2026/27 is the last tax year in which adults under 65 can use the full £20,000 allowance entirely as cash. From 6 April 2027, the cash ISA limit for under-65s drops to £12,000 — the overall £20,000 ISA allowance stays the same, but the remaining £8,000 has to go into a Stocks & Shares ISA (or another non-cash ISA). Adults aged 65 and over keep the full £20,000 cash limit. The change was confirmed at the Autumn Budget 2025 and only affects new contributions from April 2027 onwards — anything you've already put in is unaffected. If a cash ISA is a meaningful part of your plan, this is the year it matters most.

2. Review your pension contributions for the year ahead

Pensions are the largest asset most people will ever own — and the most ignored. The annual allowance (£60,000 for most people) is generous, but it's only useful if you actually use it.

The new tax year is the right moment to review three things:

1. Your contribution rate. A useful rule of thumb is to take the age you started contributing and halve it — that's the percentage of your gross salary you should be putting in (including employer contributions). Started at 22? Aim for 11%. Started at 30? Aim for 15%. Started at 40? You're playing catch-up at 20%+. If you haven't looked at this since you joined your employer, look now.

2. Whether you're using salary sacrifice. If your employer offers salary sacrifice for pension contributions, it's almost always worth using. You save National Insurance on top of income tax, which can boost the effective contribution by around 8% for basic-rate taxpayers and more for higher earners. It's free money that surprisingly few people opt into.

3. Whether you're at risk of breaching the tapered annual allowance. If you earn more than £260,000 (adjusted income), your annual allowance starts to taper down — potentially to as little as £10,000. The start of the tax year is the best time to model this, not the end, because if you're going to be tapered you want to know before you make contributions you'll be taxed on.

Why it matters: Pensions get tax relief at your marginal rate, which makes them the most tax-efficient wrapper in the UK system for higher earners. A £100 contribution costs a higher-rate taxpayer £60 net. There is no other allowance in the UK system that comes close.

One thing worth knowing: Unused pension annual allowance can be carried forward for up to three tax years, but only if you've been a member of a registered pension scheme during those years. If you had a big bonus year or a windfall coming up, this is the rule that lets you make a one-off £100,000+ contribution. Check it before you assume you've maxed out.

3. Take a snapshot of your net worth on day one of the new tax year

This is the step everyone skips, and it's the one that quietly makes everything else easier.

Your net worth is just the total value of everything you own (assets) minus everything you owe (debts). On its own, the number isn't very useful — what matters is how it changes over time. And you can't measure how it changes over time without a starting point.

The new tax year is the perfect baseline. It's a fixed, repeatable date. It maps neatly to your ISA allowance, your pension contributions, and your tax planning. And in twelve months' time, when you're sitting down to do this checklist again, you'll have something concrete to compare against.

A snapshot doesn't have to be complicated. List, in one place:

• Cash and savings (current accounts, savings accounts, premium bonds)
• Investments (ISAs, GIAs, crypto, individual shares)
• Pensions (workplace, SIPP, any old pots you've forgotten about)
• Property (estimated value, not what you paid)
• Anything else of meaningful value (a car you'd actually sell, business interests)

Then list your debts:

• Mortgage outstanding
• Credit cards (the actual balance, not the limit)
• Student loans
• Car finance, personal loans, BNPL

Subtract the second list from the first. That's your net worth on day one of the 2026/27 tax year. Write it down somewhere you'll find it again — a note on your phone, a spreadsheet, an app, wherever works.

Why it matters: A net worth number you only calculate once is just a number. A net worth number you calculate annually (or monthly) is a feedback loop — it tells you whether the things you're doing with your money are actually working. You'd be surprised how many people are convinced they're "doing well" until they actually run the numbers.

How to do it without it taking all weekend: Don't try to be perfect. A rough estimate this weekend is infinitely more valuable than a precise calculation you never get around to. You can refine it later.

4. Check your tax code and make sure HMRC has it right

This is the boring item on the list, and it's also the one most likely to actually save you money in the next few weeks.

Tax codes get updated at the start of every tax year. HMRC tries to predict your situation based on what they know — but their predictions are often wrong, especially if anything changed in the last twelve months. A wrong tax code means you're either paying too much (and waiting months for HMRC to refund you) or too little (and getting a nasty bill later).

Common reasons your tax code might be wrong:

• You changed jobs in the last year
• You started or stopped benefits in kind (private medical, company car, etc.)
• You started receiving a workplace pension
• You had an underpayment from a previous year HMRC is now collecting
• Your savings interest pushed you into a new band

How to check: Log into your HMRC personal tax account online. Your current tax code is on the front page. If you're a PAYE employee, the most common code is 1257L (which gives you the standard £12,570 personal allowance). Anything significantly different from that without a reason you understand is worth investigating.

Why it matters: Sorting this out takes about ten minutes online and can be worth hundreds — sometimes thousands — of pounds over the course of the year. It's the highest hourly rate work most people will do all year.

5. Plan your capital gains: the £3,000 allowance is small, but it resets

The capital gains tax allowance was £12,300 in 2022/23. Today it's £3,000. That's a 76% cut in three years, and almost nobody noticed because the change was phased in.

The practical implication: if you hold investments outside an ISA, you can now realise far less profit each year before paying CGT (18% for basic-rate taxpayers and 24% for higher and additional-rate taxpayers on most assets — these rates rose at the Autumn Budget 2024). Three grand is one decent year of growth on a modest portfolio. It's not nothing, but it's not much either.

The new tax year is the right moment to think about this for two reasons:

1. The allowance has just reset. If you sold some holdings in February and used last year's allowance, you have a fresh £3,000 to play with starting now.

2. You can plan ahead instead of scrambling. Most people who pay CGT pay it because they didn't think about it until they were already over the limit. If you have unwrapped investments, look at them now and decide whether you want to realise some gains gradually across the year, or hold and wait for a sale.

One strategy worth knowing about: Bed-and-ISA. This is where you sell an investment held in a General Investment Account, use the proceeds to fund your ISA, then buy the same (or a similar) investment back inside the ISA wrapper. You realise the gain (using your CGT allowance), and from that point on the holding is sheltered from tax forever. Done annually, it's a slow but reliable way to migrate unwrapped investments into the ISA wrapper without ever being out of the market for long.

Why it matters: Unused CGT allowance disappears at the end of the tax year. There's no carry-forward, no second chance. If you have gains you could be realising tax-free and you don't, that's wasted allowance.

One thing worth flagging: This isn't financial advice — bed-and-ISA in particular has rules around timing and what counts as the "same" investment. If you have a meaningful unwrapped portfolio, it's worth getting proper advice before you act.

6. Reassess your debts — especially anything coming off a fixed rate this year

Debt doesn't reset with the tax year, but the start of the tax year is still the best time to do a debt review, because most other things are getting reviewed too. Pull every debt you owe into one list and write down four things for each: the balance, the interest rate, the monthly payment, and (crucially) the date any promotional or fixed rate ends.

That last column is the one most people don't track, and it's the one that catches people out. A 0% credit card balance that's "free" for another six months is a totally different situation from one that's about to revert to 24.9% APR. A mortgage fix at 1.8% expiring in November is a financial event — you should be planning for it now, not in October.

For each debt, ask yourself: is this the lowest-cost version of this debt I can get? Could I move a credit card balance to a new 0% deal? Is there a better remortgage product I should be looking at six months early? Is there a cheaper personal loan I could consolidate to?

Why it matters: Interest rates on consumer debt are higher than the returns you can reasonably expect from any investment. A £5,000 credit card balance at 24.9% costs you roughly £100 a month in interest alone. That's £1,200 a year being deleted from your net worth before any of the rest of your financial planning even starts.

How to do it: Block out an hour, get every account open in front of you, and go one by one. The point isn't to make decisions today — it's to know what you have so you can make decisions when the moments come.

7. Set one financial goal for the tax year — and write it down

The last item on the list is the one that ties everything together. Pick one financial goal for the 2026/27 tax year. One. Not five.

It needs to be three things:

• Concrete. Not "save more". Try "max out my ISA" or "hit £75,000 net worth".
• Measurable. A number, not a feeling. "Reduce credit card debt to £0" not "get on top of my debts".
• Dated. Tied to 5 April 2027, not "soon" or "this year".

That's it. Write it down somewhere you'll see it. Tell one person who'll ask you about it in six months. The act of writing it down and committing to it publicly is most of the work.

Why it matters: People who write down financial goals hit them at dramatically higher rates than people who just hold them in their head. It's not magic — it's just that a written goal forces you to be specific, and being specific forces you to actually plan.

Why one goal, not five: Because financial progress is mostly about consistency, and consistency comes from focus. Five goals means you'll start the year sprinting in five directions and end it not sure you got anywhere. One goal means you can actually finish.

What most people get wrong about the new tax year

A few patterns worth flagging, because they're the ones that quietly cost people the most:

Treating the tax year reset as a moment, not a habit. A lot of people do a flurry of admin in early April and then don't think about their finances again until next March. The point of the new tax year isn't to do everything in one weekend — it's to set up the systems (standing orders, monthly check-ins, an annual snapshot) that mean you don't have to.

Waiting until Q4 to use allowances. If you're going to put £20,000 into an ISA this year, doing it in April is meaningfully better than doing it in March. Same for pension contributions. The earlier in the year the money is in the wrapper, the more tax-free growth you capture.

Not having a baseline to measure against. This is the one that comes up over and over. Without a starting net worth number, you have no way to tell if any of the work above is actually paying off. You can max your ISA, contribute more to your pension, clear your credit card — and if you don't track your net worth, you'll still feel exactly as financially uncertain in twelve months as you did today.

Confusing activity with progress. Opening accounts, downloading apps, making spreadsheets — none of it counts unless it changes the underlying numbers. The checklist above is useful only to the extent that it moves your net worth in the right direction. Always come back to that.

The 20-minute version

If reading this entire post felt like a lot, here's the version you can do in twenty minutes this weekend:

1. Move whatever you can into your ISA today, even if you don't pick funds yet.
2. Log into your pension and check your contribution percentage.
3. Add up everything you own, subtract everything you owe, and write the number down.
4. Log into HMRC and check your tax code.
5. Pick one number you want that net worth figure to be by 5 April 2027. Write it down.

That's the minimum viable new-tax-year checklist. Everything else on the list above is optimisation. These five steps are the ones that genuinely move the needle.

The tax year is the rare piece of UK financial admin that actually rewards being early. Almost everything else in personal finance is forgiving of procrastination — you can start an ISA in your forties, you can change pension providers any time, you can pay off debt at any pace. But your annual allowances? Those are gone on 5 April 2027 whether you used them or not. The clock started two days ago.

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