Let Property Campaign accountant

The Let Property Campaign is a long-running HMRC initiative aimed at residential landlords who have not declared all their rental income. It covers UK-resident and non-resident landlords, single properties and portfolios, current lets and lets that ended years ago. It does not cover commercial property, furnished holiday lets outside the residential rules, or non-property income; those need a different disclosure route.

Coming forward under LPC unlocks lower penalty rates than an HMRC-initiated enquiry. Penalties are calculated by reference to whether the behaviour was non-deliberate, deliberate, or deliberate and concealed, and whether the disclosure is prompted or unprompted. In practice, most landlords we act for fall into the unprompted, non-deliberate bracket and end up with penalties in a materially lower range than the "full" tariff.

HMRC's assessment window depends on behaviour. For careless errors, they can go back six years. For deliberate under-declaration, they can go back up to twenty years. For simple mistakes with reasonable care taken, the window is four years. Part of our job on any LPC case is to argue the correct behaviour category, because it directly changes both the number of years assessed and the penalty percentage applied.

We rebuild each year's rental position from bank statements, letting agent reports, tenancy agreements and mortgage statements. Where records are thin, we use HMRC's own accepted estimation methods and keep a full audit trail so the numbers stand up if challenged.

Step 1: Notification. We register your intent to disclose with HMRC. That single step protects you from higher "prompted" penalties if HMRC later opens a case, and buys 90 days to prepare the full calculation.

Step 2: Disclosure. Within the 90-day window we submit the full computation: rental income, allowable expenses, Section 24 finance-cost credit, capital allowances where relevant, tax, interest and proposed penalty by year. We also cover any related Capital Gains Tax if a property has since been sold.

Step 3: Settlement. HMRC reviews and issues a contract settlement. Where you cannot pay the full amount immediately, we negotiate a Time-to-Pay arrangement, typically over 12 to 24 months.

Most LPC clients are not tax evaders. They are people who moved abroad and let the family home; adult children who inherited a rental and did not know it needed declaring; couples who moved in together and rented out the "spare" flat; owners who assumed rental losses meant no tax to pay. HMRC treat these fact patterns very differently from concealment, and we make sure the disclosure narrative reflects that.

Non-resident landlords have additional exposure: under the Non-Resident Landlord Scheme, tax should have been withheld at source by the letting agent or tenant unless HMRC had approved gross payment via form NRL1. We handle NRL1 applications alongside the LPC where needed.

An LPC disclosure is only worth doing if the following year's return is filed properly. Once the settlement is agreed, we onboard you to a proper landlord bookkeeping setup (Hammock, FreeAgent or Xero for Landlords with per-property bank feeds), file your annual SA100 with SA105 property pages, and prepare you for Making Tax Digital for Income Tax where you are inside the threshold.