Bookkeeping for tattoo artists: tax, records and chair rent

Plenty of UK tattoo artists work for themselves, whether they rent a chair, pay the studio a percentage or run their own shop. If that is you, it makes the tax side your job: registering, keeping records and sending a return. None of it is hard once it is a habit. This guide covers the main dates and thresholds, with a link to the GOV.UK page for each one.

Self Assessment and the £1,000 trading allowance

HMRC's trading allowance is "a tax exemption of up to £1,000 a year" on trading income. If you earn more than that from tattooing, you need to register for Self Assessment and declare the income on a tax return.

The deadline to register is 5 October after the end of the tax year in which you earned it. The registration page currently says to register "by 5 October 2026" if you need to complete a tax return for the previous tax year, and that telling HMRC late can lead to a penalty.

The allowance and your expenses are either or. If you use the £1,000 allowance you cannot deduct any other expenses against that income. Once tattooing is your living, your costs will almost always be more than £1,000, and claiming expenses works out better.

What counts as an expense

GOV.UK's page on expenses if you're self-employed says you can only claim for costs related to the business, and lists categories including stock and materials, premises running costs, insurance and bank charges, advertising, and training courses. If something is used partly for personal reasons, you claim only the business part. The page's example is a £200 phone bill with £70 of business calls, where you can claim £70.

If you use traditional accounting, larger equipment is claimed through capital allowances rather than as an everyday expense; under cash basis most items are claimed as normal expenses. The list is general, not written for tattooing, so ask an accountant where things like machines, ink, needles, gloves and your council registration fee sit for you.

Keep every receipt, digital or paper, and note what it was for at the time. That one habit saves more stress in January than anything else in this guide.

Making Tax Digital for Income Tax

Making Tax Digital means keeping digital records and sending updates to HMRC through compatible software. When it applies to you depends on your qualifying income, which is your total income from self-employment and property "before expenses (also known as turnover)". That is your takings, not your profit. The GOV.UK dates are:

• Over £50,000 in the 2024 to 2025 tax year: use it from 6 April 2026.
• Over £30,000 in the 2025 to 2026 tax year: use it from 6 April 2027.
• Over £20,000 in the 2026 to 2027 tax year: use it from 6 April 2028.

A busy artist can pass £30,000 in takings well before their profit gets near it, so check your turnover rather than what you keep. The sign-up page says HMRC will not apply penalty points for late quarterly updates in the first tax year, 2026 to 2027. Penalties for late returns and late payment still apply.

VAT

You must register for VAT if your total taxable turnover for the last 12 months goes over £90,000, or if you expect it to go over £90,000 in the next 30 days alone. The test is your turnover "for the last 12 months", so once you are getting close, check that total every month rather than waiting for the end of the tax year.

How long to keep records

HMRC says you must keep your records for at least 5 years after the 31 January submission deadline of the relevant tax year. Its example: if you sent your 2022 to 2023 return online by 31 January 2024, you keep the records until at least the end of January 2029.

Chair rent or a percentage

Paying chair rent or giving the studio a percentage changes how much you keep, and it can also bear on whether you are self-employed at all. HMRC has no guidance written for tattooing, but its page on employment status in hair and beauty is the closest match. It says to look at both your contract and "your actual day to day working practices". Signs of self-employment it lists include deciding your own hours, providing your own clients and deciding how much you charge. It names renting a chair or room in a salon as one way to work freelance.

If you are not sure, HMRC's Check Employment Status for Tax tool gives an answer, and HMRC says it "will stand by all results given by the tool" as long as the information you give stays accurate and in line with its guidance.

To see which arrangement leaves you more money at your level of takings, try the studio split calculator. It shows what you keep each week under a percentage, chair rent or a day rate, and where chair rent starts to win.

Where TattooInn fits

TattooInn's money view shows what you have earned through the app and the fees you have paid us, and the Studio plan keeps a record of each resident's commission split. It is a record of bookings, not your accounts, so it sits alongside your bookkeeping rather than replacing it. See TattooInn for artists or how booking apps compare on fees.