The New Tax Year and What It Changed for Fire Safety Owners

The second step arrived today, and the position is now settled

Business Asset Disposal Relief, which lets a qualifying owner pay less tax on the gain from a sale, has taxed that gain at 18% since Apr 2026, having been 14% until Apr 2026 and 10% before that. It applies to qualifying gains up to a £1m lifetime limit, and it sits against a main higher rate of Capital Gains Tax, the tax on the gain when you sell, of 24%. Which rate applies depends on the date the sale contract becomes unconditional, often but not always completion day, which matters only for deals in flight across the line.

Stated in cash rather than percentages, the relief is worth up to £60,000 on a full £1m qualifying gain compared with the main rate. A meaningful sum, and smaller than it was two years ago, which is the whole of the story. There is no further announced step, so for the first time since the autumn of 2024 an owner planning a sale is working with a known rate rather than a countdown.

That is worth pausing on, because the last eighteen months produced a good deal of hurried thinking. Owners who did not sell into the deadline have not lost anything that preparation cannot recover, and the gap between a well prepared sale and a rushed one is comfortably larger than the six points between the two rates.

The inheritance tax change has had less attention and affects more owners

From today the 100% rate of business property relief is capped. The first £2.5m of combined business and agricultural assets attracts 100% relief, and value above that attracts 50%, which produces an effective inheritance tax rate of 20% on the excess. The allowance is transferable between spouses and civil partners, so a couple can shelter up to £5m between them. The government expects up to 1,100 estates across the UK to pay more inheritance tax in 2026-27 as a result.

For fire safety owners this changes an assumption many have carried for years, which is that holding the business until death was the tax-efficient answer and a sale was the expensive one. Where a certificated business with a substantial contracted base is worth more than the allowance, holding it now carries a cost that has to be weighed rather than assumed away.

None of that is advice about what to do, and it should not be read as such. It is a reason to have the conversation with your own tax adviser this year rather than next, particularly if you have been assuming that succession planning and planning a sale are separate subjects. They were closer together than that before today, and they are closer still now.

What a rate change should change, and what it should not

It should change your timetable for getting a number. Both of the changes above are calculated against what the business is actually worth, and a conversation about either of them is guesswork without a baseline. The exercise takes under 15 minutes and stays private.

It should not change the preparation plan. The contracted share of revenue, the certification file and the qualifications behind it, the renewal history, the documentation, the question of who holds technical authority: every one of those is worth more to a buyer than the rate is to the Treasury, and none of them is affected by anything that happened today. The work that raises a price is the same work it was last week.

What it does change, quietly, is the argument for drift. An owner who intended to decide something in 2024 and still has not is now two rate steps and a relief cap further along, and the business is two years older. That is not a reason to sell. It is a reason to decide, which is a different and considerably easier thing to do.

Tax and legal advice on a sale comes from your own advisers, and it helps to know who you will need, and when to bring them in.