The 5 April Line: Tax Year End Timing for Heating and Plumbing Owners

The DateThe completion date is the one that counts, not the handshake

The tax year ends on 5 April, and for an owner selling a plumbing, heating or air conditioning business the date that matters is the date the deal completes. Not the date you agreed a price, not the date heads of terms were signed, not the date your accountant first ran the numbers. Completion is what fixes which tax year the disposal falls into and which rate applies to it.

That distinction catches people out every spring. An owner who shakes hands in February and completes in May has made a disposal in the following tax year, whatever the handshake felt like. The paperwork lags the decision by months in almost every deal I see, and the gap between the two is where the tax planning either works or does not.

Business Asset Disposal Relief is 10% today on qualifying gains up to a £1m lifetime limit. The Autumn Budget on 30 October 2024 set that rate to rise to 14% on 6 April 2025 and again to 18% on 6 April 2026. Anti-forestalling rules have applied since Budget day, which means a contract entered into now and completed later is looked at on its purpose rather than its date. That is a conversation for your own tax adviser, not a reason to rush a sale.

The paperwork lags the decision by months in almost every deal, and the gap between the two is where the planning either works or does not.

The RunwayWhat can genuinely be done in the weeks that are left

A sale of an owner-managed heating business, from first approach to money in the account, usually runs six to nine months. Preparation before that adds more. So if the tax year end is five weeks away and you have not started, the honest answer is that this year is not the year, and the useful question becomes what to do with the next twelve months instead.

What can be done in five weeks is the groundwork that makes the following year quicker. Get three years of accounts and management figures into a form someone else can read. Pull your service contracts together with their renewal dates and values. Check that every engineer's Gas Safe registration and F-Gas certification is current and on file. Write down what only you know, because that list is the thing a buyer discounts for.

None of that is glamorous and all of it shortens diligence later. Owners who do it in a quiet March find that the following autumn, when a buyer does appear, they are answering questions in days rather than weeks. The deal does not get better because you hurried; it gets better because you were ready.

The DecisionA rate change is a reason to know your number, not to sell

A known increase in a tax rate is a genuine input into timing, and it is sensible to understand what it means for your own figures. It is not, on its own, a reason to sell a business you were not otherwise ready to sell. A rushed sale typically costs more in price than the rate difference saves in tax, because the things that lift a price, a documented contract book, a retained team, clean records, take a year or two to build and cannot be assembled in a hurry.

The sensible order is the other way round. Establish an honest baseline for what the business is worth as it stands today. Then decide whether the number, the tax position and your own plans point at this year, next year or the year after. Owners who know their number make calm decisions; owners who do not make fast ones.

If the tax year end has prompted you to think about it at all, that is worth something even if you do nothing this April. Most of the owners I speak to first make the decision quietly, months before they tell anyone, and then spend a year getting the business into the state they want a buyer to find it in.