HMRC Can Now See Your Vinted Sales. Here Is What That Means for Your 2025/26 Tax Return.
Vinted now reports seller income to HMRC. If you sold on Vinted in 2025/26, here is whether you owe tax, how much and what to do before January 2027.
SELF ASSESSMENT TAX RETURNS
From January 2024, Vinted has been legally required to report seller income directly to HMRC. If you sold regularly on Vinted during the 2025/26 tax year, 6 April 2025 to 5 April 2026, HMRC already holds your gross sales data. This does not mean every Vinted seller owes tax. It does mean that if you do owe tax and you do not file a Self Assessment return, HMRC is now in a position to know about it. What you need to understand is whether your selling counts as a trade, whether you are above the threshold that triggers a tax obligation and what to do before 31 January 2027.
Jade has been selling on Vinted since 2021. It started as a clear-out — bags, shoes, clothes she no longer wore. Then it became a habit. Then, somewhere around 2024, it quietly became something more structured. She was buying items specifically to resell. She had a feel for what sold fast and at what price. She was not running a business in any formal sense; no website, no business account, no logo. But she was earning from it consistently, and in 2025/26 her gross Vinted sales came to just over £9,000.
She had heard something about platforms reporting to HMRC. A post in a Facebook group. A comment from a colleague. She was not sure what it meant for her specifically. She was not sure if £9,000 counted. She was not sure if she needed to do anything before January.
The answer, in her case, was yes. And the sooner she understood why, the more options she had.
What DAC7 Actually Means and Why It Changed Everything
DAC7 is a piece of European-origin legislation that the UK adopted to require digital platforms to collect and report seller income data to tax authorities. It came into force for UK sellers from January 2024.
Before DAC7, HMRC knew selling platforms existed. It knew people earned money on them. It did not have the data to know who earned what. That has now changed. Vinted, eBay, Etsy, Depop, Amazon, Airbnb and a growing list of other platforms now send HMRC a report each year showing how much each seller received in gross sales. The report includes the seller's name, address, National Insurance number and the total gross amount received during the reporting period.
This is not a future risk. For the 2025/26 tax year, the data transfer has already happened.
What this means practically is that the gap between what a seller declares and what HMRC holds has closed. Previously, a Vinted seller who did not file a return was invisible to HMRC unless something prompted an investigation. Now the data is there automatically. HMRC's systems can cross-reference the platform report against Self Assessment records and flag sellers who appear to have an obligation but have not filed.
This does not mean HMRC is going to investigate every Vinted seller. It means the information exists, and using it is straightforward if HMRC chooses to.
Do You Actually Owe Tax on Your Vinted Sales?
This is where a lot of sellers get confused. Not every pound earned on Vinted is taxable. The answer depends on what you were selling and why.
If you were selling your own unwanted personal possessions, clothes you had bought for yourself, items from your home you no longer needed — this is generally not a trading activity. HMRC's position is that selling personal items does not constitute a trade. The proceeds are not income for tax purposes. You are not required to declare them.
If you were buying items specifically to resell , buying low, selling higher, repeating the cycle, this is trading. It does not matter that you were doing it informally or through an app. The activity is commercial and the income is taxable.
If it started as personal and became commercial, which describes a significant number of Vinted sellers, the line sits where the activity shifted from clearing out possessions to actively buying to sell. There is no single bright-line test. HMRC looks at frequency, volume, whether items were bought with resale in mind, and whether the activity shows the badges of trade.
The badges of trade are a set of indicators HMRC uses to assess whether an activity constitutes trading. They include the frequency of transactions, the similarity of each transaction to a commercial operation, the profit motive, modifications made to items before resale and the length of time between buying and selling. No single badge is conclusive. The overall picture determines the answer.
Jade was buying items specifically to resell. Her 2025/26 activity, buying at charity shops and car boot sales, listing on Vinted, consistent sales of £9,000 gross, had the badges of trade. She was trading. Her income was taxable.
The £1,000 Trading Allowance- Does It Help?
Every UK taxpayer has a £1,000 trading allowance. If your total income from self-employment and trading activity including all platforms combined is below £1,000 in a tax year, you do not need to declare it or pay tax on it.
If your gross trading income is above £1,000, you have two options. Claim the £1,000 trading allowance and pay tax on everything above it. Or claim your actual allowable expenses and pay tax on the profit after expenses. You cannot do both.
For a seller with minimal costs, someone selling personal possessions with no buying-to-resell activity, the trading allowance may be the simpler route. For a seller who genuinely buys to resell and has real costs; the price paid for stock, postage, packaging, mileage to car boot sales — actual expenses will almost always produce a lower taxable profit than the £1,000 allowance.
Jade's gross sales were £9,000. Her costs were real, £3,200 in stock purchases, £480 in postage and packaging, £340 in mileage. Her actual expenses totalled £4,020. Her taxable profit after actual expenses: £4,980. If she had claimed the trading allowance instead £9,000 minus £1,000, her taxable profit would have been £8,000. The difference in tax: over £780. Actual expenses win by a significant margin.
What Jade Needed to File Her 2025/26 Return
Step one — Register for Self Assessment. Jade needed to register by 5 October 2026. If that deadline has passed, register now regardless — late registration is better than no registration, and HMRC treats voluntary registration more leniently than being contacted first. Registration is at gov.uk. The Unique Taxpayer Reference arrives within ten working days.
Step two — Download her Vinted transaction report. The report shows gross sales, any fees charged and payouts made for the full year. It gives Jade the correct gross income figure — the one HMRC already holds — and the fee total she can claim as an expense. Next week's post covers exactly how to download this report from the Vinted seller dashboard, step by step.
Step three — Reconstruct her costs. Stock purchases from bank statements, postage from receipts or bank records, mileage to collection and drop-off points at 45p per mile for 2025/26. If records were not kept, the guide to filing Self Assessment with no records covers the reconstruction process in full — including how to work back from bank statements when nothing was tracked at the time.
Step four — Calculate what she owes. Income tax on profit above the £12,570 personal allowance at 20 percent. Class 4 NI on profit above £12,570 at 6 percent. Payment on account if the combined bill exceeds £1,000. The UK Sole Trader Tax Calculator 2025/26 takes the gross income figure from the Vinted report, the expense total from her records and the P60 figures from her employed role — she is a teaching assistant — and calculates the complete January 2027 bill automatically.
What Happens If You Do Not File
Missing the 31 January 2027 deadline has immediate financial consequences. A £100 penalty applies the moment the deadline passes, regardless of whether any tax is owed. After three months, daily penalties of £10 begin to accrue — up to a maximum of £900. After six months, a further penalty of 5 percent of the tax owed or £300 is added. After twelve months, another 5 percent or £300.
Interest accrues on any unpaid tax from the payment deadline. The current HMRC late payment interest rate is 7.25 percent per annum on the outstanding balance.
For a seller who owes relatively little — a tax bill of £600, for instance — the penalties for missing the deadline can exceed the original tax liability within a few months.
Filing late is always better than not filing. The penalties reduce significantly once a return is submitted, even after the deadline. The £100 fixed penalty is unavoidable once January has passed. The escalating penalties that follow are not.
The full penalty structure, interest rates and what to do if you have already missed a deadline are covered in the article on what happens if you miss the Self Assessment deadline.
Jade's Position: What She Did
Jade downloaded her Vinted transaction report in August 2026. Gross sales for 2025/26: £9,200 including fees charged by Vinted. Her actual gross sales before fees: £9,200. The fees Vinted charged: £414. Net payout to her bank: £8,786.
She pulled her stock purchase costs from her bank statements, £3,200 over the year. Postage and packaging: £480. Mileage to car boot sales and collection points — she reconstructed 760 miles from her calendar: £342.
Total expenses: £4,436. Trading profit: £4,764.
She was also employed as a teaching assistant on a salary of £18,500. Her P60 showed income tax of £1,186 already collected through PAYE and no student loan. She entered all of this into the UK Sole Trader Tax Calculator 2025/26.
Combined income: £23,264. Personal allowance £12,570 already used by the salary. Self-employment profit taxable from the first pound. Income tax through Self Assessment: £953. Class 4 NI: £0, her profit of £4,764 was below the £12,570 NI threshold. Payment on account: not applicable, her Self Assessment bill was below £1,000.
Total due 31 January 2027: £953.
Less than she had feared. More than zero. And now she knew the exact number with enough time to have it ready.
The DAC7 data did not create Jade's tax liability. She had owed this since her first commercial sale. What it changed was the likelihood that not filing would go unnoticed. It no longer will.
Next week: How to download your Vinted transaction report — the exact steps to get the gross income figure HMRC already holds, ready for your Self Assessment return.
Bookkeeping
Email:
Contact Us
crystal@rhodiumaccounting.co.uk
© 2026. All rights reserved | Privacy Policy | Terms and Conditions
Monthly Management Reporting
Budgets & Forecasts
Cash flow Optimisation
Processes and Controls