The original plan was to put your company’s profit on the internet for your competitor to read.
This month, that plan changed. Here’s what’s actually happening, in plain English, before someone sends you a panicked email about it.
What was originally proposed
A couple of years ago, the government decided small companies should start filing a full profit and loss account on the public register at Companies House – where anyone can search it. Your competitor. Your landlord. The client sitting across from you mid-negotiation.
Unsurprisingly, that didn’t land well with small business owners.
What’s actually happening from April 2028
On 9 June 2026, the government confirmed how these reforms will actually work. Here’s the headline version:
Small companies and micro-entities will have to file a profit and loss account with Companies House — but you’ll be able to opt out of publishing it.
You still file it. Companies House keeps it on record. The public doesn’t get to read it.
In their own words, Companies House say the opt-out “addresses concerns from the business and investment community around the privacy and commercial risks for smaller companies of disclosing this information.”
Translated: enough people pointed out that your margin is nobody’s business but yours, HMRC’s, and whoever you choose to show it to — and the government listened.
The slightly on-brand part? You can opt out of publishing your profit, but exactly how you do that hasn’t been confirmed yet. The official line is that details “will be confirmed in due course.”
So: the relief is real. The instructions are pending.
The rest of the package
A few other changes are landing alongside this:
- Paper and web filing are going. From April 2028, all accounts must be filed through commercial accounting software. If you already file electronically (most businesses do), this is a non-event.
- Abridged accounts are being abolished. The stripped-back version many small companies currently file won’t be an option anymore.
- Tighter audit exemption wording for companies claiming an exemption.
Originally all of this was due in April 2027. It got paused, and is now confirmed for April 2028 – so there’s time to prepare, but I wouldn’t tattoo the date on just yet given the history of this policy.
Why this matters for limited company directors
A sole trader’s tax return goes to HMRC and stops there. It’s private.
The day you incorporate, you trade some of that privacy for the protection of limited liability – that’s a fair deal. But forcing your full profit line onto a public website that anyone can search was a step beyond that deal.
People judge a number with no story attached. Your best year on paper might be the year you reinvested everything back into the business rather than taking it out. The public register doesn’t show that context – it just shows a figure.
So this outcome is a good one: file it, keep it private, get on with your year.
The questions this raised (and the honest answers)
When I posted about this, a few really good questions came up – worth covering here too.
“If it’s not being published, what’s the point of filing it at all?”
Data, not theatre. Companies House and HMRC will have it on file even though the public can’t see it. The stated aim of these reforms is tackling economic crime – giving HMRC the ability to cross-check your filed P&L against your CT600 (Corporation Tax return) and flag discrepancies, spot companies that look “dormant” on paper but are clearly trading, and so on.
“Won’t credit agencies take a dim view of companies that opt out?”
Possibly – but credit scoring already pulls from plenty of other sources: payment history, CCJs, open banking data. Non-disclosure of one extra figure is unlikely to swing things the way it might have a decade ago.
“Isn’t this just more admin for small businesses, for not much benefit?”
For a very small company doing a handful of transactions a year on a spreadsheet, moving everything into accounting software is a genuine extra cost. And there’s a fair dose of cynicism worth acknowledging here too: people who are actually committing fraud tend to find workarounds – they always do. The ones most likely to get caught out are honest directors who make a simple admin error.
That doesn’t mean the overall goal is wrong. But it’s worth being clear-eyed about who these changes land hardest on.
“Will HMRC actually use this data, though?”
This is the real question. More data and more admin for businesses is only worth it if it’s acted on. Whether that happens in practice is something we’ll only know once the changes are live – but it’s a fair challenge to put to the system.
What you should actually do now
Nothing urgent. This is a 2028 problem, not a June 2026 one.
But it’s exactly the kind of thing worth having someone keep an eye on for you – so that when the opt-out mechanism is confirmed, you (or whoever files your accounts) knows to action it, rather than discovering three years from now that your accounting software defaulted to “publish” because nobody read the small print.
If you want a steer on what this means for your specific company once more detail lands, get in touch – it’s exactly the kind of thing we flag to clients well ahead of time.
