Free MTD Software for Landlords 2026 — No Bank Lock-in Required

From April 2026, UK landlords with combined rental and self-employment income above £50,000 must use HMRC-recognised software to keep digital records and submit quarterly updates under Making Tax Digital for Income Tax Self Assessment. The bad news: most "free" landlord MTD software has a catch — usually a bank account requirement, a property limit, or a "free for one rental, pay if you have more" structure. The good news: there is at least one option that is genuinely free, works with any UK bank, and supports both property and self-employment income in one submission. This guide compares your options honestly.

Do landlords need to use MTD ITSA?

If you receive UK or foreign rental income from property — residential lets, holiday lets, or commercial property held in your personal name — and your gross rental income (plus any sole-trader income) totals more than £50,000 in the 2024/25 tax year, you fall into the first MTD ITSA cohort starting 6 April 2026. The £50,000 figure is gross income, not profit, and is calculated before deducting mortgage interest, agent fees, repairs, or any other expense.

From 6 April 2027 the threshold drops to £30,000, and from 6 April 2028 it drops again to £20,000. By the end of the 2028/29 tax year, the vast majority of UK landlords will be inside MTD. Anyone earning rental income through a limited company files Corporation Tax — not MTD ITSA — so this guide does not apply to incorporated landlords. We cover that scenario separately further down.

Once you fall inside MTD ITSA, you must:

• Keep digital records of every rental transaction in HMRC-recognised software (no paper, no plain spreadsheet).
• Send a quarterly update to HMRC for each income source — UK property is one source, foreign property is a separate source, self-employment is another. A landlord with both UK and foreign property submits two property updates each quarter.
• File a final declaration after the tax year ends — broadly equivalent to the old self-assessment return — confirming the year's totals and triggering the tax calculation.

The first quarterly update for the 2026/27 tax year covers 6 April – 5 July 2026, with a filing deadline of 7 August 2026. Miss it and the soft-landing rules apply for Year 1 only — see our MTD ITSA penalties guide for the full breakdown.

What does "free" really mean? The hidden catches in landlord MTD software

The word "free" gets used loosely in the MTD market. Almost every provider that advertises a free tier ties it to something — a specific bank, a property cap, a transaction cap, or a bundle that locks you into a service you may not want. Here is what each of the headline-free options actually requires.

FreeAgent — only free with NatWest, RBS, Mettle, or Ulster

FreeAgent is fully MTD-recognised and arguably one of the most polished accounting platforms in the UK. It is free only if you hold a NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland, Mettle, or Ulster Bank business current account. If you bank with anyone else — Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, Santander, Starling, Monzo, Tide, Wise, Revolut, Co-op, Nationwide, Metro, Allica, Cashplus, OakNorth, ANNA, or any other UK provider — FreeAgent costs £19/month for a sole trader plan or £29/month for a landlord plan. For a landlord with three properties paying £29/month for ten years, the "free" alternative costs £3,480 over a decade.

GetGround — free, but landlord-only and limited company-focused

GetGround is free for personal landlords but the platform is built around incorporated landlords using GetGround's company formation service. If you let property in your own name, you can use the bookkeeping side without forming a company, but every workflow nudges you toward incorporation. There is no support for sole-trader income, so a landlord who also freelances has to use a second tool for self-employment.

ANNA Money — free if you bank with ANNA

ANNA's MTD product (ANNA + Taxes) is bundled with the ANNA business account. To get the free MTD submission, you must move your banking to ANNA. If you already use ANNA, this is fine. If you don't, you're swapping one form of payment for another — switching banks is rarely truly free in time terms.

Starling Accounting — free with a Starling business account, sole-trader only

Starling's bookkeeping product is included free with the Starling Business Toolkit, but the toolkit is only available with a Starling business current account. It also does not support property income — Starling Accounting is built for sole traders, not landlords. A property investor cannot file rental quarterly updates from Starling.

Hammock — free trial, then paid

Hammock is property-focused and well designed, but the free tier is a 14-day trial. After that it is £8.99–£24.99/month per landlord depending on portfolio size. For one rental it is affordable; for a portfolio it adds up.

Landlord Studio GO — free for up to 3 units, US-style fit

Landlord Studio's free GO tier covers three units. Beyond three you pay $12/month per portfolio. The MTD submission flow is workable but the product is built primarily for the US rental market and the UK MTD pieces are bolted on rather than built in.

Clear Books Free — free for sole traders and landlords with limits

Clear Books offers a free MTD plan with no bank requirement, which is unusual and welcome. The catch is feature scope — bank feeds are limited, the UI is older, and the AI categorisation is basic. It works, but it feels like 2018-era accounting software.

What VoxaMTD includes for landlords

VoxaMTD is built for the dual-income landlord — somebody who owns rental property and may also have sole-trader, freelance, or side-hustle income. Everything below is included on the free tier with no transaction cap and no property cap.

• Property tracking by unit. Add unlimited properties (UK or foreign), tag every rent receipt and expense to the correct unit, and split shared costs (insurance, accountant fees) by floor area, room count, or any custom rule.
• Section 24 finance-cost basis. Mortgage interest is automatically captured as a finance-cost relief item rather than an allowable expense, with the 20% basic-rate tax credit calculated correctly on your final declaration. Use our free Section 24 calculator to model the impact, and the rental yield calculator to benchmark gross/net returns. See our Section 24 deep-dive.
• Quarterly UK and foreign property submissions. Each property income source is submitted separately as HMRC requires. Foreign property income is treated correctly with the right currency and DTA flags.
• Final declaration with the full SA105 / SA106 equivalent fields. Allowable expenses, replacement of domestic items, capital allowances on furnished holiday lets, and rent-a-room relief are all supported.
• FCA-registered open banking via Finexer. Connect any of 40+ UK banks. No need to switch banking — VoxaMTD reads your existing account.
• AI categorisation. Transactions are auto-categorised against landlord-specific rules (rental income, letting agent fees, repairs vs improvements, mortgage interest vs capital repayment).
• HMRC-recognised production credentials. Quarterly updates and final declarations submit straight to HMRC's production MTD ITSA APIs.

For dual-income landlords (rental plus sole trader) the same submission flow handles both — see our hybrid earner guide for the mechanics.

How to connect your bank account in 5 minutes

The hardest part of getting MTD-ready is usually connecting bank feeds. Here is the actual flow for a new VoxaMTD landlord account, end to end.

1. Sign up at voxamtd.com/signup. Email and password — no credit card. Verify the email and you are in.
2. Choose "Landlord" or "Landlord and self-employed". The onboarding adapts to the income types you select.
3. Connect your bank. VoxaMTD uses Finexer, which is FCA-registered as an Account Information Service Provider. You'll be redirected to your bank's strong customer authentication flow (face ID, app approval, or 2FA), then back to VoxaMTD with the consent token. The whole step takes 90 seconds for most banks.
4. Connect HMRC. One-time OAuth handshake with the HMRC government gateway authorises VoxaMTD to file on your behalf for MTD ITSA. Your gateway credentials never leave HMRC — the consent uses an OAuth token.
5. Add your properties. Property type (residential, FHL, commercial, foreign), address, ownership share if jointly owned, mortgage details if any, and the date you first received rent.
6. Categorise the historic transactions. The AI handles 80–90% automatically. You review and confirm the rest in batches with one-click bulk-categorise actions.

From a clean start the typical landlord is fully MTD-ready in about 12 minutes. From an existing FreeAgent or QuickBooks export, the import-and-reconcile flow takes 30–45 minutes.

What about Section 24 mortgage interest restriction?

Section 24 of the Finance (No. 2) Act 2015 removed the ability for individual landlords to deduct mortgage interest as an allowable expense against rental profit. Instead, mortgage interest now generates a 20% basic-rate tax credit applied after the tax calculation. This change has been fully phased in since the 2020/21 tax year, and MTD ITSA does not change the rules — but it does change how you record interest in software.

Under MTD, mortgage interest must be reported as a "residential property finance cost" — separate from allowable expenses. Most generic accounting software (Xero, QuickBooks) requires manual chart-of-accounts customisation to do this correctly, and many landlords miscategorise interest as an expense, inflating their reported profit and triggering an overpayment of tax that has to be reclaimed.

VoxaMTD treats mortgage interest as a finance cost by default for any transaction tagged to a residential rental property. The basic-rate credit is calculated automatically on your final declaration and reduces your tax bill in the right place. For higher-rate taxpayers with leveraged buy-to-let portfolios, this is the single biggest source of error in DIY MTD filing — and the single biggest reason landlords overpay HMRC.

If you are weighing whether to incorporate to avoid Section 24, that is a separate decision that depends on your portfolio scale, financing, and exit plans. We do not advise on incorporation in this guide — but if you do incorporate, you fall outside MTD ITSA entirely and your company files Corporation Tax instead.

Landlords with limited companies — are you in scope?

No. If your rental property is owned inside a limited company (a Special Purpose Vehicle or "SPV"), the company files Corporation Tax via CT600, not personal MTD ITSA. The director's salary and dividends are taxed personally, but those amounts do not count toward the £50,000 MTD ITSA threshold.

However: if you personally own some properties and a company owns others, the personally held properties still count toward your individual MTD ITSA threshold. A landlord with three SPV-held BTLs and one personally held flat earning £18,000 gross rent is below the £50,000 threshold for 2026/27 and would only fall into MTD ITSA in 2028 when the threshold drops to £20,000.

How VoxaMTD compares to FreeAgent, GetGround, ANNA, and Hammock

If you bank with NatWest and only have property income with no sole-trader work, FreeAgent is a defensible free choice. For everyone else — and especially for hybrid earners — VoxaMTD is structurally cheaper because there is no scenario in which it stops being free.

Why landlords are switching now, not in April 2026

HMRC's quarterly updates work on calendar quarters by default — 6 April to 5 July, then 6 July to 5 October, and so on. The first deadline most landlords face is 7 August 2026 for the Q1 update. To file that update you need three months of clean, categorised, digital-record-keeping data covering April through July. Setting up software in late July to file an August deadline is risky — bank feeds usually backdate 90 days, but reconciling three months of property transactions in a week is unpleasant.

Switching now (May 2026) means your first quarterly update in August has clean data from day one of the tax year. It also means if anything goes wrong with your bank connection, your HMRC OAuth, or your property setup, you have time to fix it before HMRC counts your first late submission against you under the post-soft-landing penalty regime starting 2027/28.

Start free with VoxaMTD — no card required, works with any UK bank, supports unlimited properties, and includes hybrid sole-trader income in the same submission.