Tax Advisers & Personal Tax Specialists in Broadstairs

Broadstairs runs on its coastline. Seven sandy bays, from Viking Bay under the clifftop promenade round to Botany Bay and Kingsgate, pull visitors through the whole season, and the Dickens Festival each June keeps the town’s oldest selling point working for it. That popularity shapes the tax questions people bring us from CT10: holiday lets and second homes, retirement incomes that turn out to be more complicated than expected, and seasonal businesses squeezing a year’s trade into half a year.

Kent Tax Specialists is a personal tax practice qualified with the ACCA and the ATT and registered as an agent with HMRC. Personal tax and small business tax is all we do, for clients across Broadstairs, St Peter’s and the wider isle, including retired residents, holiday-let landlords and seasonal traders. Most engagements begin with a fixed-fee quote agreed in writing before work starts, and as a registered HMRC agent we deal with HMRC directly on a client’s behalf, from routine filing to formal enquiries.

Broadstairs has long been a holiday-letting town, and the tax rules for those owners changed materially when the furnished holiday lettings regime was abolished from April 2025. The old advantages, including full mortgage interest deduction and favourable capital gains treatment, have gone, and holiday lets are now taxed like ordinary residential lets. Owners also face the digital platform reporting rules, under which booking sites report host income to HMRC directly, and Making Tax Digital for Income Tax, which already applies at £50,000 of qualifying income and reaches £30,000 from April 2027.

We prepare landlord tax returns for holiday-let and buy-to-let owners, apply the post-2025 rules correctly rather than by habit, and handle voluntary disclosures where letting income from earlier years never made it onto a return. Many owners are only realising the position has changed after receiving a platform reporting letter from HMRC. We review each owner’s figures under the new rules and quote a fixed fee before any voluntary disclosure work begins.

Broadstairs is a town people retire to, and retirement rarely simplifies tax the way people expect. A state pension, one or two private pensions, savings interest and perhaps some dividend income can add up to a position where allowances interact badly: the personal savings allowance shrinks as income rises, dividend allowances are tighter than they were, and a pension lump sum taken carelessly can push a year’s income into a higher band that careful timing would have avoided.

Our personal tax advice work for retired clients covers exactly this ground: checking tax codes across multiple pension sources, timing withdrawals, using Marriage Allowance where it applies, and confirming whether HMRC actually requires a return at all, because many pensioners file unnecessarily while others who should file do not. We also look at whether a small amount of self-employment or consultancy income alongside pensions changes the picture, and set out the figures in plain terms rather than jargon, so a client can see clearly why a return is or is not needed.

Property sales generate more urgent Broadstairs enquiries than anything else. Your main home is normally covered by private residence relief, but a second home, an inherited property or a former holiday let is not, and any taxable gain on UK residential property must be reported and the tax paid within 60 days of completion. Sixty days passes quickly when probate paperwork or estate agents are involved, and late reporting attracts penalties on top of interest. Downsizers selling a long-held family home and owners of a second property near the seafront are the two situations that come up most often, and the relief position differs in each case.

We handle capital gains tax from both ends: planning before a sale, so reliefs, losses and ownership structure are sorted while they can still help, and fast, accurate 60-day reporting once completion happens. We also help executors work out the base cost of an inherited property before it is sold, since that figure is often missed until the deadline is already looming.

Behind the beaches, Broadstairs supports cafes, restaurants, guesthouses and a base of self-employed trades and freelancers. Seasonal trading concentrates a year’s income into a few months, which makes payments on account genuinely painful if nobody plans for them, and pushes busy businesses toward the £90,000 VAT registration threshold faster than owners expect. A guesthouse or café that takes most of its bookings between Easter and September can end a strong summer with a large tax bill due the following January, and a second payment on account due by July, catching owners who spent the surplus assuming the whole year’s profit was theirs to keep.

We prepare Self Assessment tax return for sole traders, handle VAT returns where registration is due or already overdue, and run Making Tax Digital set-up so quarterly digital filing fits around the season rather than fighting it. We also help owners monitor turnover against the VAT threshold month by month, so registration happens by choice rather than as a surprise.

Three things, in our view: real qualifications, direct HMRC standing and honest pricing. Our advisers are qualified with the ACCA and the ATT. The practice is a registered HMRC agent, so we file returns, view the relevant parts of your HMRC record and handle correspondence through official agent channels, including full HMRC investigations representation if an enquiry opens. That HMRC standing matters most when something has gone wrong, whether that is a compliance check, a discovery assessment or simply a return that was never filed, because we can speak to HMRC directly rather than a client having to relay messages back and forth. And every piece of work is quoted as a fixed fee, agreed in writing before anything starts.

Construction subcontractors are covered too: CIS tax refund claims recover overpaid CIS deductions, currently going back as far as the 2022/23 tax year. That work sits alongside CIS registration checks and monthly return support for contractors who need to stay compliant as well as recover what they are owed.

Clients come to us from the town centre, St Peter’s, Dumpton and the lanes out toward Kingsgate. Most of the work runs by phone, email and secure document exchange, which suits retired clients and seasonal owners equally well, and we arrange face-to-face meetings where the situation deserves one, typically complex capital gains planning or an HMRC enquiry.

This suits Broadstairs well. Many of our clients here are retired or semi-retired and would rather not travel for a meeting that a phone call or a short video call covers just as well, and holiday-let owners managing bookings around a day job value being able to send documents securely whenever it suits them. Every client, wherever they are based on the isle, gets the same fixed-fee quote agreed before work starts and the same ACCA and ATT-qualified oversight. Where a meeting genuinely helps, such as working through an inheritance, an HMRC enquiry or complicated capital gains figures, we arrange one locally rather than asking a client to make an unnecessary journey.

If you are looking for a tax adviser in Broadstairs, you do not need tidy paperwork to start. A holiday let whose rules changed underneath it, a pension position that no longer makes sense, a completion date that starts a 60-day clock, or a letter from HMRC: tell us what is happening and we will tell you plainly what needs doing, what it costs and when it will be done.

Most first conversations are short. We ask what has happened, what paperwork exists already, whether HMRC has been in touch, and by when a deadline falls, and from that we can usually say straight away what the next step is and quote a fixed fee for doing it, agreed in writing before any work begins. Whether you are a long-standing Broadstairs resident, new to the area, or managing a holiday let from further away, the process is the same: contact us, describe the situation in your own words, and we will take it from there.