Tax Year End and the Security Business Owner's Calendar

What the tax year end changes, and what it does not

Business Asset Disposal Relief, the relief that gives a qualifying owner a lower rate of tax on a sale, was 10% until April 2025. From April 2025 the rate went up to 14%, and in Apr 2026 it went up again to 18%, both steps announced at the Autumn Budget in October 2024 against a lifetime limit of £1m of qualifying gains. Those are the facts, and they are worth stating plainly, because the way they usually reach owners is not plain at all.

What the date does not do is create a deadline for deciding anything. Since Budget day there have been rules against signing early just to catch a lower rate, so the older devices for fixing a rate early no longer work as advertised. The rate is normally set by the date the sale contract becomes binding, which for most sales comes at or near the end of a process rather than the start of one, and a process not already under way in March is not completing before April however motivated everybody is.

The honest position for most security owners reading this in March is therefore short. The rate applying to your disposal is normally the one live when the sale contract becomes binding, the difference between 10% and 14% on a full £1m gain was £40,000, and that was a real number which should not be allowed to drive a decision worth a great deal more than £40,000.

It is also worth saying what the change is not. It is not a penalty aimed at owner-managed businesses, it is not a surprise, and it is not the largest number in any decision about selling up. It is a scheduled change carrying two published dates, and it is best treated the way any scheduled change is treated: noted, planned around, and then left alone.

A security sale runs to a timetable, not a date

The sequence in this sector is reasonably consistent. Preparation and a baseline valuation, then a controlled approach to buyers who can actually acquire a certificated security business, then offers, heads of terms (the short document setting out the main points of the deal), diligence and completion. Diligence, the buyer's detailed check of the business, is the part that stretches, and in security it stretches for specific reasons: licensing records, vetting files, contract terms and notice periods, and the state of the monitoring base.

Most owner-managed sales in this trade run somewhere between five and nine months from decision to money arriving, and the ones that run faster are almost always the ones that prepared first. A firm able to produce its SIA licence register, its BS 7858 files, its certification scope and a clean contract schedule within a week of being asked does not then spend three months answering questions about them.

Which puts March in a different light. It is a poor month to try to complete in and an excellent month to prepare in, because the year just ending is the set of figures a buyer will scrutinise first and it is still fresh enough to put right.

The preparation that genuinely belongs in March

Three things reward being done before the year closes. The first is separating the contract book into recurring monitoring and maintenance income, guarding revenue and one-off project work, so the next set of accounts presents the business the way a buyer reads it rather than the way the bookkeeping happened to fall.

The second is the adjustments. Owner remuneration, a vehicle or two, a property held personally, family on the payroll in roles a buyer would not replace: every one of those is defensible, and every one has to be documented rather than asserted. Doing it in March, against the year you have just lived through, is straightforward. Doing it eighteen months later from memory is not.

The third is the workforce file. Licence expiry dates, vetting records, who holds what and when it renews. A buyer will ask for that file, and it is easy to leave until a sale is under way. It takes an afternoon a year to keep and it removes an entire category of diligence friction.

None of the three requires a decision to sell. They are the sort of housekeeping that makes a security business easier to run whether or not it ever changes hands, which is the test I would apply to any preparation somebody recommends before a sale is even on the table.

Before a sale you will need an accountant or tax adviser and a corporate solicitor, and it helps to know when to bring each one in.