The British tax year ends on 5 April and the new one begins on the 6th, which is the single oddest date on the national calendar. It descends from the old Lady Day quarter on 25 March, shifted by the eleven days dropped when Britain adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752 and by one more in 1800. Nobody has ever quite got round to moving it, so April 2026 carries the changeover as usual.
April 2026 is the most leave-heavy month of the British spring. Families take the Easter fortnight, workers bridge the days between Good Friday and Easter Monday with a couple of days of annual leave to turn it into ten days off in a row, and the roads and airports fill accordingly for the first time since the New Year.
April 2026 runs to 30 days and sits at the start of the second calendar quarter of a year of 365 days. The tax year that opened on the 6th has eleven and a half months still to run, and the next fixed deadline against it, the paper filing date, is not until the end of October.
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