Business Asset Disposal Relief just halved. The clock is 6 April 2027.
The lifetime limit drops from £1m to £500,000. If a disposal was already somewhere on your horizon, the date just became the most important number in the plan.
Most of the Budget coverage on the day was about landlords and first-time buyers. This measure got a fraction of the attention and it has a hard deadline attached, which makes it the most actionable thing announced.
Business Asset Disposal Relief lets you pay a reduced rate of capital gains tax on qualifying gains when you dispose of a business. The lifetime limit on how much relief you can claim is being cut from £1,000,000 to £500,000, for disposals made on or after 6 April 2027.
What changed, precisely
So the relief has been getting less generous in steps. The rate moved first, the limit moves next.
The rough arithmetic
Illustratively, and this needs checking against your own position before you act on it: on a qualifying gain of £1m, the second £500,000 moves from the BADR rate to the main rate. At 18% against 24% that is six percentage points on £500,000, so in the region of £30,000 of additional tax.
Whether that figure holds for you depends on your other gains, your lifetime claims to date, how the disposal is structured and which rate band applies. The number is worth modelling properly rather than taking from an article.
Who this actually catches
Not every property investor. BADR applies to business disposals rather than to selling an investment property, so a landlord selling a rental house is not in scope. The people in scope are the ones we see a lot of.
If you are in one of those positions and a disposal was loosely planned for "sometime in the next few years", that vagueness just became expensive.
Bringing a disposal forward is a funding exercise
This is where it stops being an accountancy story. Moving a disposal from 2028 into the window before April 2027 usually means something has to be cleared, settled or restructured first, and on a timetable.
All of that is short-term secured lending against property, which is the work we do. The point is simply that a tax deadline is often a finance deadline wearing different clothes, and the finance takes longer to arrange than people allow for.
What to get in order now
This article is general information about the Budget and property finance. It is not tax advice. Rates and thresholds announced on Budget day can change as legislation passes. Speak to a qualified accountant or tax adviser about your own position.
“A deadline like this creates two mistakes. Missing it when you could have met it, and chasing it into a deal you should not have done. Work out which of those you are at risk of, early, because the answer changes what we would arrange and when.”