UK inheritance tax receipts reach £3.2bn in four months, with the pension change still to come

HM Revenue & Customs published its monthly tax receipts bulletin on 21 August 2026. Inheritance tax receipts for April to July 2026 came to £3.2 billion, according to The Intermediary, which is £0.1 billion more than the same four months a year earlier. HMRC said June 2026 produced the highest monthly receipts on record.

The department attributes the trend to three things it has cited before: a larger volume of wealth transfers following liable deaths, higher asset values, and the decision to hold the tax-free thresholds at their 2020/21 levels up to and including 2030/31. It also repeated its usual caveat that monthly figures can be distorted by a handful of very large payments, as happened in June and October 2023, September and October 2024, and April and December 2025.

The rate of increase has eased

A £0.1 billion year-on-year rise over four months is modest against the pace of recent years. Inheritance tax raised £8.5 billion in 2025/26, up from £7.5 billion the year before. Ian Dyall, head of estate planning at Evelyn Partners, told The Intermediary that the slowdown probably reflects moderating property values in London and the South East, which has taken value out of some estates.

That reading matters for how families interpret the number. The slowdown is a property-market effect, not a change in policy direction. Two policy changes with more bite have either only just landed or have yet to arrive.

What has not shown up in the data yet

The restrictions to agricultural and business property relief took effect in April 2026, and their consequences are not visible in receipts for the first four months of the year. For families holding a trading company or a landed estate, that is the reform with the sharpest edge on the balance sheet.

From 6 April 2027, unused pension funds fall within the scope of inheritance tax. Dyall pointed out that beneficiaries of savers who died after age 75 may pay income tax at their marginal rate on withdrawals from a pot that has already been reduced by inheritance tax, which in some cases leaves them with a little over a third of the value the saver put aside.

Nick Henshaw of Wesleyan raised a practical problem that trustees and executors will recognise. Pension arrangements can surface after an estate has been settled, and if they do, the inheritance tax position across the whole estate may have to be reopened. A beneficiary can face a bill years after the money has been distributed. Keeping a current record of every pension arrangement is dull work, and it is the kind of thing that separates a well-run family office from an improvised one.

The mobility question

Simon Martin, head of UK technical services at Utmost, framed the wider issue: the threshold freeze runs to 2031, business property relief has been reformed, and pensions come into scope in 2027. He argued this raises a question about how attractive the UK looks to entrepreneurs and wealth creators who can move, particularly where other jurisdictions offer more competitive terms.

For a UK-resident family with an estate over the thresholds, the practical work sits with the advisers: reviewing beneficiary nominations set under the old pension regime, checking whether gifting patterns still make sense, and looking again at how business relief interacts with succession plans. As WealthBriefing noted in its coverage of the same figures, the nil-rate band remains at £325,000 and the residence nil-rate band at £175,000, so estates that were once comfortably outside the net keep drifting into it.

Sources: HM Revenue & Customs monthly bulletin, The Intermediary, WealthBriefing.