HMRC published a collection of reports and documents on 9 July 2026, including its annual report and accounts, which analyses its performance for the year to 31 March 2026, together with how it performed against its charter standards.

Performance against targets 

Although HMRC missed five of its six headline targets for 2025/26, it has made progress compared to earlier years. In 2025/26, it met its target for answering calls for the first time since 2017/2018 and closed in on its targets for responding to post. 

Digital first

A key target set for HMRC by government is at least 90% digital self-serve interactions by 2030. HMRC continues to make progress towards this goal, with 77.1% of customer service interactions made through automated or digital self-serve channels for the final quarter of 2025/26 (up from 65% five years ago). 

It is suggested that the increased availability and use of digital services may be helping to improve HMRC’s performance on telephone calls and post, by reducing demand for more traditional means of contact. In 2025/26, HMRC received 29.1m calls, down from 33.5m for 2024/25, and handled 19.8m items of post, down from 20.5m for 2024/25. 

Compliance yield

Although HMRC narrowly missed its compliance yield target for 2025/26 (by £200m), it exceeded its target in two of the three financial years between 2022/23 and 2024/25, resulting in a net overperformance of £1.9 billion across the period.

An increasing proportion of HMRC’s compliance yield comes from its upstream activities (41.8% for 2025/26 compared to 23.9% in 2019/20). As explained in a technical note, upstream yield relates to the impact of changes to the legislation to “close tax loopholes” and HMRC’s work “to promote compliance and prevent non-compliance before it occurs”. 

Tax debt

Although tax debt increased, to £44.7bn at 31 March 2026 from £44bn at 31 March 2025, it fell as a percentage of total tax receipts, from 5.0% in 2024/25 to 4.7% in 2025/26. Tax losses – tax debt which can’t be collected and is written off – increased from £7.2bn (0.8% of total tax receipts) for 2024/25 to £12.8bn (1.4% of total tax receipts) for 2025/26, as HMRC concluded its collection activities with regard to older tax debts. HMRC expects tax debt as a proportion of tax receipts to fall to between 3% and 4% by 2029/30. 

HMRC’s efforts to help the government close the tax gap are summarised in a separate article. 

Performance against the charter

HMRC’s charter sets out the standards of service that taxpayers and agents should expect from HMRC. The annual report includes a summary of a survey undertaken by the Charter Stakeholder Group, of which ICAEW is a member. More detailed information has been published separately. 

Agent and taxpayers’ experiences

The survey asked respondents to give a score out of 10 for HMRC’s performance against each of the charter standards, with one being the lowest and 10 the highest. The survey received 719 responses, mainly from agents.   

The three standards that can be said to represent the ‘health’ of the tax system received the lowest average scores, and were all down on 2024/25: 

• being responsive: 2.8 (3 for 2024/25);
• making things easy: 3.25 (3.37 for 2024/25); and
• getting things right: 3.97 (4.1 for 2024/25). 

In addition, 81.59% of respondents did not think that HMRC is held sufficiently accountable for its performance against the charter. 

Respondents to the survey criticised HMRC’s continued push towards online tools and the accuracy of the advice given by HMRC staff. Several respondents observed that when HMRC makes an error, it can take multiple contacts and an excessive length of time to obtain rectification. 

Higher scores were recorded for the remaining five charter standards, which can be said to address the context in which HMRC operates. These include recognising that someone can represent you (6.31) and keeping your data secure (6.86).

However, agents repeated previous concerns that they still cannot access all the information their clients can see and that HMRC still doesn’t provide the same digital services for agents as for taxpayers. A recent article, covering the publication by HMRC of an update on its 2025 transformation roadmap, highlights the slow progress made by HMRC in improving its digital services for agents.  

HMRC’s view 

HMRC’s own research, found that 62% of agents surveyed reported a positive experience dealing with the tax issues, unchanged from the previous year. Key findings included that taxpayers and agents “were comfortable using HMRC’s digital services routine activities”, but that “more complex or case-specific issues continue to drive contact through telephone helplines” where “long wait times and repeated transfers continue to undermine experience”. 

J P Marks, HMRC’s Chief Executive and First Permanent Secretary, acknowledged the challenges facing taxpayers and agents in his foreword to HMRC’s accounts, commenting that the progress made in 2025/26 lays “the foundations for further improvements” to come in HMRC’s services. 

ICAEW's view