HMRC performance update: July 2026

Our priorities are to close the tax gap, improve day to day performance and the overall customer experience and modernise tax and customs administration. These are enshrined in our departmental strategic objectives, which you can read about in our latest annual reports and accounts published by HMRC. 

This publication shows how we are performing against our key performance measures within each strategic objective. Some measures are updated each month, others each quarter. The data provided is provisional and subject to change, with final data for the financial year included within and alongside the Annual Report and Accounts in Summer 2027.

Our lead measures for this priority are the tax gap and compliance yield. In 2024 to 2025, the tax gap was:

The absolute value was £59.2 billion. The tax gap is the difference between the amount of tax that should, in theory, be paid to HMRC, and what is actually paid. For the latest tax gap statistics, please see Measuring tax gaps 2026 edition: tax gap estimates for 2024 to 2025. 

The compliance yield we brought in during quarter 1 was:

Each year, we collect and protect billions of pounds of revenue that would have been lost to the Exchequer without our interventions. Our compliance work helps to keep the tax gap low.  

We want to collect more of the tax that is due, whilst supporting customers who are in financial difficulty to manage their way out of debt with our flexible Time to Pay arrangements. The measures below show the trends on various debt measures. Our lead metric for debt is the tax debt balance as a proportion of tax receipts, which we report annually in HMRC’s annual report and accounts. 

We know there will be occasions where customers disagree with us on the amount of tax that is due. We seek to resolve any dispute as quickly and cost-effectively as possible, in accordance with the law, using our Litigation and Settlement Strategy and our Code of Governance for resolving tax disputes.