The Summer VAT Cut Has Ended: Check Your Till Before HMRC Does

This one is short and it is urgent, so I’ll get straight to it.

The temporary 5% VAT rate on children’s meals, children’s tickets and family attractions ended on 1 September 2026. Everything it covered went back to 20% the next day.

If your till, your booking system or your bookkeeping software is still set to 5%, you are not saving anyone money. You are collecting 5% and you owe HMRC 20%, and the 15% gap comes out of your own pocket. On a summer’s worth of trade that is not a rounding error.

What the relief actually covered

It ran from 25 June 2026 to 1 September 2026 inclusive. Three things fell inside it.

Children’s meals, but only meals held out for sale as children’s meals, eaten on the premises. A smaller portion of an adult dish didn’t count. Takeaway didn’t count. Neither did a “kids eat free” deal bundled with an adult main.

Children’s tickets to cinemas, theatres, shows, concerts and exhibitions. Family packages that included at least one child got the reduced rate on the whole ticket, not just the child’s share.

Admission to qualifying family attractions, and this was the broad one. Theme parks, zoos, museums, soft play. Every visitor qualified at 5%, adults included. Sports events were out, and so were season tickets and repeat-entry passes running past the end of the relief.

The bit that catches people out

The rate was set by the date of admission, not the date somebody paid.

So a ticket sold in August for a visit in October was always a 20% sale. If your booking system applied 5% because that was the rate on the day the card was taken, you have under-declared VAT on every advance booking you took over the summer for an autumn date.

That is the one I’d check first if you sell tickets ahead. It is quiet, it compounds, and nobody notices it until the VAT return doesn’t reconcile.

What to check this week

Five things, and none of them take long.

1. Your till or EPOS. Are the children’s meal buttons and admission buttons back on the standard rate from 2 September?

2. Your online booking system. Same question, and check it separately, because the two are often configured independently.

3. Your bookkeeping software. If you set up a 5% tax code in June, it is probably still sitting there ready to be picked by accident.

4. Advance bookings taken before 1 September for dates after it. These should be at 20%.

5. Your printed menus and price lists, if they showed a VAT-inclusive price that assumed 5%.

What to do if you have got it wrong

Don’t panic and don’t sit on it.

If the error is under £10,000 in net VAT terms, you can usually correct it on your next VAT return. Above that there is a threshold linked to your turnover and it may need a separate disclosure to HMRC.

Either way, correcting it yourself before HMRC finds it is a completely different conversation to correcting it after. Unprompted disclosures attract far lower penalties, and in a fair number of cases none at all. I have never once seen someone regret picking up the phone early.

One piece of good news while we are on VAT

From 1 October 2026, VAT on domestic electricity drops to 0%. Small businesses, charities and residential care homes that already qualify for the 5% reduced rate on their energy get it too.

The government reckons it is worth about £45 a year to the average household. For a business running fridges, fryers or a soft play frame all day it is a good deal more than that. Worth checking your next energy bill actually reflects it, because not every supplier will get it right first time either.

Why these temporary rates are harder than they look

I’ll be honest, I’m not a fan of them.

A temporary rate sounds like a gift, and for the customer it is. For the business it means two rate changes, two software reconfigurations, a set of tax point rules that most people have never had to think about, and a permanent risk that something gets left switched on. The businesses that end up out of pocket are almost never the ones that were trying it on. They are the ones that were busy.

If you run a cafe, a play centre, a museum or anything that sold a family ticket this summer, spend ten minutes on the list above. It is a lot cheaper than the alternative.