Self-assessment taxes; stamp duty deadline and Awful April - here are the big financial dates for your diary in 2025
The same ritual isn’t quite such a joy when your work life revolves around personal finances, and most of the pages you complete mean higher taxes, bigger bills and more misery.
Just a few days in and we’re already reeling from the new energy price cap, which added £21 to the average bill. For parents with children in private school there was the end of the VAT break on private schools at the same time. And to complete the trio of bad news, the £2 bus fare cap rose to £3.
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Hide AdBut while it’s always tempting to keep the diary firmly closed, and our heads in the sand, it’s worth knowing what’s on the way, so you can prepare for changes and get anything done ahead of any deadlines. So it’s in the spirit of helpfulness that I present a somewhat gloomy list of 10 key dates to look out for this year.


31 January - Self-assessment deadline
If you need to complete a tax return, you’ll need to get cracking. If you’ve left it to the last minute, don’t worry, you’re not alone: 778,068 people filed their tax return on 31 January 2024 – the last possible day. However, it means you risk running out of time to check the details, so try to start the process as early as possible to protect yourself.
1 February - Alcohol duty freeze ends
The pause on duty rises comes to an end just in time to hit anyone emerging from Dry January. Alcohol duty rates will rise with RPI – although draught drinks in pubs will be excluded. It’s a sign of just how much bad news was in October’s Budget that people were celebrating this exclusion as a win.
6 February - First Bank of England MPC meeting of 2025
Economists have been expecting this to be the date of the next interest rate cut in the UK. If we get a cut, it will be great news for mortgage borrowers on tracker deals, who will see rates fall again. It could also mean cheaper fixed deals. However, on the flip side, it’s likely to mean saving gets less rewarding, and because the UK has more savers than mortgage borrowers, overall this cut is going to be bad news for more people.
2 March – Rail fares rise
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Hide AdThe cap on regulated rail fares will rise by 4.6 per cent - which is bad news for anyone who feels they already pay more than enough for train travel.
31 March - Stamp duty holiday on property ends
In September 2022, the stamp duty threshold was raised from £125,000 to £250,000. The threshold for first-time buyers was also increased from £300,000 to £425,000 – and the maximum that a property can be worth and still benefit from this relief rose to £625,000 (up from £500,000). At the end of March, the thresholds will revert.
It means buyers will be keen to get sales through ahead of the change. Unfortunately, there’s a decent chance that the rush to buy will end up pushing house prices even further, unwinding any potential tax savings. Prices are already at record highs, and with mortgages rates still running hot, there’s a real risk it’s going to price more people out of the market.
1 April – Awful April
Awful April kicks off with a raft of price rises. Council tax will be up by as much as 4.99 per cent, car tax will rise in line with RPI - and tax on electric vehicles comes into effect. The TV licence fee is set to rise £5 with inflation to £174.50, water bills are up by an average of £27.40 to £473 and air passenger duty rises come in. It’s not all bad news though, because the new energy price cap will kick in, which is expected to be slightly lower than in January. Meanwhile the minimum wage will rise.
5 April – End of the tax year
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Hide AdThis is always worth planning for, to make sure you take advantage of all your allowances – from using your capital gains tax allowance if you’re sitting on gains, to taking advantage of ISA and pension allowances before the deadline.
This year there’s another key deadline on the day – the one for voluntary National Insurance contribution catch ups. Usually, you can choose to pay to top up NI contributions to fill gaps over the previous six years. When the new state pension was introduced in April 2013, certain people were given until 5 April 2023 to top up for any years between 6 April 2006 and 5 April 2016. There’s been a series of extensions to this deadline – but this is when it finally runs out.
6 April – Start of the new tax year
We’re programmed to respond to deadlines, so the first day of the tax year passes unnoticed for most people. However, if you get cracking with using your tax allowances now, you can benefit from them for almost an entire year longer than if you wait for the deadline.
Unfortunately, for yet another year, there’s also a change that’s notable by its absence – income tax thresholds will remain frozen, taking more of your money with every pay rise. It’s clever, because it takes more of your pay rise, rather than leaving you worse off, so it’s harder to spot than a tax hike. However, the impact is significant. Millions more people will be dragged into paying income tax, and millions will pay a higher rate.
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Hide AdIt's not all misery though. On this date, benefits will rise with September’s inflation figure of 1.7 per cent, while state pensions will rise (according to the triple lock) with wages at 4.1 per cent. For those on Universal Credit, there’s also the news that the Help to Save scheme will be expanded, so anyone getting this benefit will be eligible. This is a brilliant scheme, with government bonuses that are so generous that the returns can’t be beaten by any other savings product.
1 August – Student fee rise takes effect in England
From this point, the maximum fee will rise from £9,250 to £9,535 – after being frozen since 2017. It means more students taking on bigger loans, and thanks to changes to the loans system in 2022, newer students will be repaying more of it for longer too.
1 September – the rollout of free childcare is completed
Not every day in the diary is another one to dread, so when we get to the start of the new school year, there’s more good news for parents with children of pre-school age. By this point, working parents of children under the age of five will be entitled to 30 hours of free childcare a week. And while the system is far from perfect, it should make a significant difference to the over-stretched finances of any young family.
Divorce Day
Just in case January felt too upbeat, Divorce Day is on the way on Monday. This is the first working Monday of the year, when divorce lawyers report a surge in people approaching them to take on a divorce. The good news is that over the years, the divorce rate has been falling, but the number of people splitting at an older age is still relatively high, which comes with additional risks.
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Hide AdDivorce always means dividing your assets, and by this stage you may have more to lose, so it’s worth getting good advice. This can mean speaking to a financial adviser as well as a divorce lawyer. Unfortunately, divorcing later also gives you less time to build your assets up again, so try to think about everything from your emergency savings safety net to rebuilding your pension as a priority as soon as you can.
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