Five Weeks to April: Tax Year End for Electrical Business Owners

The clock runs to the contract date, not to the handshake

The tax year ends in April, and the date that matters to an owner selling an electrical or M&E business is none of the ones that feel significant at the time. Not the evening you decided. Not the meeting where a price was agreed. Not the signing of heads of terms, the short document setting out the main points of the deal. The date the sale contract is made places the disposal in one tax year rather than the next (for a conditional contract, the date its conditions are met), and that date sits months behind the decision.

Business Asset Disposal Relief, which gives a lower tax rate to owners selling a business they work in, was 10% on qualifying gains up to a £1m lifetime limit until Apr 2025, then 14% for the 2025/26 tax year, and has been 18% since Apr 2026. Both rises were announced at the Autumn Budget in October 2024. Since Budget day there have also been anti-forestalling rules, meant to stop owners signing early just to keep an old rate: a contract signed now and completed later is judged on its purpose rather than simply on its date, and that is a matter for your own tax adviser rather than for an article.

That gap is where the arithmetic quietly happens. Selling an owner-managed electrical business normally runs six to nine months end to end, so a March handshake usually means a contract signed around August, and a contract made in August belongs to the tax year that began in April. Owners are regularly caught by this, and it is the cheapest surprise in the whole process to avoid, because avoiding it requires nothing more than reading a calendar.

What five weeks can genuinely be used for

Five weeks out from the tax year end, with nothing under way, the realistic position is that April belongs to next year's plan rather than to this one. That does not make March a wasted month. It makes it the point at which the coming year can be spent on the unglamorous work that shortens every stage of a sale beginning later.

In this trade that work has a specific shape. Pull the contract register together with renewal dates, values and notice periods. Get the retentions schedule into one place: every sum a main contractor is holding back from you, the date its defects period ends and it falls due, and the amount you expect to recover, because retentions and work in progress are where a buyer's accountant spends the longest. Reconcile the certification archive so any job from the last six years can be produced in minutes. List ECS card expiry dates and JIB grades alongside each engineer. Check your Construction Industry Scheme status and deduction records are clean.

None of that is exciting and all of it compounds. Owners who spend a quiet March on it find that when a buyer does appear, questions are answered in days rather than in weeks, and the deal holds its price because nothing surfaces late. A price is lost far more often to a surprise in due diligence, the buyer's detailed check, than to a poor negotiation.

A known rate change is an input to timing, not a reason to sell

A scheduled rate change is a real input into when you sell, and a poor reason on its own to sell at all. The features that lift the price of an electrical business, a documented contract book, a graded team that stays, testing income under written terms, certificates anybody can find, are each built across a year or two of ordinary trading. Not one of them can be produced in a quarter, which is why hurrying past them generally costs more than the rate ever will.

The order that works is the opposite one. Find out what the business is worth today, as it actually is rather than as you would describe it to a client. Weigh that figure against the tax position and against how much longer you want to be doing this. A choice made with the number in front of you is a decision, and one made without it is a reaction.

If the tax year end is what made you think about any of this, the thinking counts even when nothing else happens before it. Most owners in this trade reach the decision privately and sit with it for months, then spend the following year tidying the business into a shape they would be content for a stranger to inspect.

Tax treatment depends on your own circumstances, so take advice from your own accountant or tax adviser; we set out which professionals you will need, and when.