Budget Month and the HVAC Owner's Year-End Checklist

Update, November 2026. The October 2026 Budget announced that the Business Asset Disposal Relief lifetime limit will fall from £1 million to £500,000 for qualifying disposals from the start of the 2027 to 2028 tax year in April 2027. Relief already claimed counts towards the limit, and the 18% rate does not change. For tax, the date of an unconditional contract normally counts as the date of disposal rather than completion, and specific rules will apply to contracts signed before the change that complete after it. Where this page quotes a different limit, rate or date, this note takes priority. Take advice on your own position. What the change means for owners.

What is already legislated, and therefore already plannable

Business Asset Disposal Relief, which cuts the tax for owners selling a business they work in, has been 18% on qualifying gains up to a £1m lifetime limit since Apr 2026, the second of the rises set at the Autumn Budget in October 2024. That is not speculation, it is the current legislated position, and the rate that applies is normally set by the day the sale contract becomes binding with no conditions left, which is often completion day. If a sale is anywhere on your horizon, that rate is the one to plan around rather than any announcement.

The same Budget announced a cap on agricultural and business property relief for inheritance tax from April 2026, above which the 100% relief no longer applies in full. For an owner whose business is a large part of their estate, that changes the arithmetic of holding it rather than selling it, and it is a conversation to have with your own tax adviser rather than one to read about. I would raise it now because the effective date is closer than most owners realise.

Both of those are announced measures with legislated dates, which is what makes them plannable. That is the distinction worth holding on to through the next four weeks: an announced change with a date attached is something to work back from, and a forecast about what might be announced is not. Almost everything written about the Budget between now and the end of the month will be the second thing.

Nothing about a Budget that has not happened is worth acting on

Every autumn brings the same advice to sell before something happens, and every autumn most of it turns out to have been wrong about what would happen. Six to nine months separate a first approach from a completion, with preparation before that, so a deal started on a rumour in November completes long after the announcement it was reacting to. The timetable itself makes the strategy impossible.

The sensible position is the dull one. Know your number, know your legislated position, and let a Budget change your timing only if it changes something you can point at afterwards. Owners who sell well are almost never reacting to news; they are executing a plan made a year or two earlier, and a Budget is an input into that plan rather than a starting gun.

The year-end housekeeping that shortens next year's diligence

Close the year with the contract schedule reconciled: every agreement, its annual value, its renewal date and whether it renewed this autumn. Do the same with certifications, listing every registration and certificate against its expiry. Both documents take an afternoon in November and are worth a fortnight in a due diligence process (the buyer's detailed check of your business) eighteen months from now.

Then put this year's figures somewhere a stranger could follow them. Three years of accounts with a short note explaining anything unusual, the adjustments you would expect a buyer to make to arrive at adjusted EBITDA, the day-to-day operating profit before interest, tax and wear on vans and kit that most buyers price from, and the reasons for them. Owners who do this annually find the conversation with an acquirer starts from their version of the numbers rather than from a reconstruction of them, which is worth more in a negotiation than it sounds on paper.

None of that is affected by anything announced this month, which is rather the point. The work that improves a sale is the work that would have been worth doing anyway, and November, with the heating season underway and the year's shape now obvious, is a reasonable time to do it.

If your sale is a few years off, here is how to get the business ready, stage by stage.