The Self Assessment company directors 2025/26 new boxes rules mean that if you’re a UK director filing a tax return, you now face mandatory questions that could cost you £60 per slip if you get them wrong.From the 2025/26 tax year onwards, HMRC has introduced new mandatory questions on the employment pages of the Self Assessment return. Directors of close companies — which covers most owner-managed UK limited companies — must now answer them in detail.HMRC estimates around 900,000 individuals will be affected. Directors will file the first returns under the new rules from 6 April 2026, with the usual 31 January 2027 deadline.Here’s what’s changed, what you now have to disclose, how the new £60 penalty works, and what to do before you sit down to file. If you’d rather start with the bigger picture of how Self Assessment, dividends, salary, and expenses fit together for directors, our
limited company directors tax guide covers the wider ground.
What’s actually changed on the 2025/26 Self Assessment return
In previous years, the SA102 (Employment) pages of the Self Assessment return included a couple of optional tick boxes. They asked whether you were a company director during the tax year and whether the company was a close company. Plenty of directors left them blank — and HMRC didn’t chase it up.That’s over.From 2025/26 onwards, those boxes are mandatory. HMRC has also bolted on several extra questions for any director of a close company.The legal basis sits in
The Income Tax (Additional Information to be included in Returns) Regulations 2025. Finance Act 2024 created the power to charge a penalty for failing to comply.
The new mandatory information required on each SA102 page is:- Confirmation that you were a company director during the tax year
- Confirmation of whether the company is a close company
- The company name
- The Companies House registration number
- The total dividends received from that specific close company during the tax year, reported separately from any other UK dividend income
- The highest percentage shareholding you held at any point during the tax year
Crucially, you must complete a separate SA102 employment page for each directorship. If you sit on the board of three close companies, that’s three SA102 pages with three full sets of new boxes. A single catch-all white-space disclosure isn’t sufficient.There’s also a separate change worth knowing about. From 2025/26, if a self-employed business begins or ends during the tax year, you must now report the start and end dates. This applies to individual, trust and partnership returns. It’s not strictly part of the director changes, but it kicks in at the same time.
Is your company a close company? (Almost certainly, yes)
A close company is a UK-resident company controlled by five or fewer individual participators — meaning shareholders or directors, broadly. That definition catches a huge proportion of UK businesses.If you’re a contractor, freelancer or family business owner running your own limited company, you’re almost certainly a director of a close company. If it’s just you, or you and your partner, owning the shares, that’s a close company.Non-close companies do exist — typically large listed businesses or those with very dispersed ownership — but they’re rare in the small business world. The bottom line: if you own and run a limited company in the UK, assume the new rules apply to you and check carefully if you think they don’t.One important wrinkle: even directors of non-close companies must still complete the mandatory directorship confirmation box. The enhanced reporting (company number, dividends, shareholding) only applies to close company directorships, but the basic “were you a director” tick is now universal.
The new £60 penalty: small number, big problem
The headline figure is £60 — a fixed penalty for each instance of non-compliance with the new reporting requirements. On its own, that doesn’t sound especially scary. The catch is that the penalty can stack.HMRC has needed to create this new penalty because the disclosures don’t directly affect a director’s Income Tax or Capital Gains Tax liability — they’re information requirements. That puts them outside HMRC’s existing penalty regime for inaccurate returns (which is built around tax lost), hence the bespoke £60 fixed charge.What’s not yet fully clear is whether the £60 applies per missing piece of information, per SA102 page, or per return. HMRC hasn’t published definitive guidance on that point. What is clear is this: a director of three close companies who leaves the new boxes blank across all three SA102 pages faces multiple penalties.That could mean several hundred pounds for what is, by any measure, an administrative slip.The penalty applies to 2025/26 returns onwards. There’s no retrospective penalty for earlier returns where the boxes were optional.It’s also worth being explicit: leaving a box blank is not the same as entering zero. If the figure you need to report is genuinely nil — for instance, the company paid no dividends in the year — enter zero rather than leaving the box empty. A blank box may be treated as missing information and trigger the penalty.
Shareholding percentage: easy in theory, sometimes awkward in practice
HMRC’s SA102 Employment Notes for 2025/26 states that you should use: “the highest percentage shareholding you received throughout the year.”So if you started the year owning 60% of the shares and reduced your holding to 50% mid-year, you report 60%, not 50% and not an average.The calculation is based on the nominal value of shares owned, not the market value. Where there’s only one class of share, that’s straightforward — if you own half the shares in issue, you report 50%.Where it gets harder is companies with multiple share classes carrying different nominal values or different rights to income and capital.In those cases the calculation has to account for the total nominal value across all classes, not just a count of share certificates. HMRC has not yet fully clarified how to report complex alphabet share structures, growth shares or shares with different rights. Advisers are flagging this as one of the practical grey areas.A separate point worth knowing: some software packages have reportedly been struggling to accept zero in the shareholding box. If your circumstances mean you genuinely need to enter zero (for example, a director who holds no shares at all), check with your software provider that it allows the entry. A paper return is more error-prone in general and probably best avoided where possible.
Why HMRC is doing this
The new disclosures aren’t random. They form part of a broader compliance push aimed squarely at how owner-managed companies extract profits.Under the old rules, directors reported dividend income on the Self Assessment return as a single total. HMRC couldn’t easily tell how much of that came from a director’s own close company versus other investments. Now it can.The close company dividends are split out on the SA102, and the Companies House registration number lets HMRC cross-reference the figure against the company’s own filings and Corporation Tax return.Shareholding percentages add another layer: HMRC can check whether dividend payments track ownership, or whether something more creative is going on.This isn’t the end of the story. In March 2026, HMRC published a separate consultation — Reporting company payments to participators — which ran until 10 June 2026. If the proposals proceed, close companies themselves would be required to report transactions with participators to HMRC.Draft legislation is expected once HMRC has considered the responses, with any new rules likely to appear in a future Finance Act.In other words, the SA102 changes for 2025/26 are the first wave. Expect more reporting obligations on close companies themselves to follow.
Who doesn’t need to worry
Not every director needs to file a Self Assessment return. If your only income is salary fully taxed through PAYE, you have no dividend income, and no other reason to file, you don’t file a return. And if you don’t file, the new boxes don’t apply to you.Equally, directors of genuinely non-close companies (uncommon for owner-managed businesses) sit outside the enhanced reporting, although the basic directorship tick still applies.Everyone else who is both a director of a close company and a Self Assessment filer is in scope.
What to do before you file
A short, practical checklist for the 2025/26 return:
- Pull together the Companies House registration number for every company you’re a director of. You’ll need it for each SA102 page.
- Check your shareholding at the start and end of the tax year, and during the year if there were any changes — report the highest figure held at any point.
- If your company has more than one class of shares, work out the percentage based on total nominal value across all classes, not just the share count. If the structure is at all unusual, consider taking advice.
- Keep dividend records broken down by company — don’t lump dividends from your own company together with dividends from listed investments.
- Complete every new box, even where the answer is zero. Blanks are not the same as zeroes and may attract the penalty.
- If you’re still a director of a dormant company, you must still complete the new boxes — with zeroes where applicable.
- File online rather than on paper to reduce the risk of processing errors.
- If you’re not sure whether your software handles the new boxes properly (the zero issue, multiple SA102 pages for multiple directorships), check with the provider before filing.
The bigger picture
For most directors, the practical change is modest: a bit more record-keeping and a few extra boxes to tick. For directors with multiple directorships or unusual share structures, the new rules need more care — both to get the figures right and to avoid stacking £60 penalties.But it’s worth recognising what these changes are really about. HMRC is closing a long-standing visibility gap on how owner-managed companies pay their owners, and the SA102 changes are one step in that direction.A separate consultation is already out on close company reporting of transactions with participators. The direction of travel is unmistakable: more granular reporting, more cross-referencing, and less room for grey-area extraction strategies to go unnoticed.Have you previously handled your own Self Assessment without much thought? 2025/26 is a good year to slow down and gather the right information. If your share structure or directorship arrangements are at all complex, talk to your accountant before you click submit.
