Covering ME1, ME2, ME4, ME5, ME7, ME8 Post Codes
Tax Advisers & Personal Tax Specialists in Medway
ACCA and ATT qualified, HMRC-registered personal tax advisers serving the Medway towns: Self Assessment, landlord tax, CIS refunds, capital gains, Making Tax Digital and HMRC enquiry support.
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Years Experience
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Kent towns covered
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Fixed Pricing
Medway is not one town but five. Strood, Rochester, Chatham, Gillingham and Rainham run into one another along the lower reaches of the river, and since 1998 they have been governed together as a unitary authority, separate from Kent County Council and home to around 280,000 people. The tax lives inside those ME postcodes are as varied as the towns themselves: dockyard heritage and regeneration in Chatham, Kent’s largest hospital in Gillingham, a tourist economy in Rochester, and commuter streets stretching from Strood to Rainham.
We are Kent Tax Specialists, a personal tax practice qualified with the ACCA and the ATT and registered as an agent with HMRC. We act for individuals and small businesses across all five Medway towns and the villages around them. This page looks at the district as a whole. Each town also has its own dedicated page, including Chatham, Gillingham and Rochester, and that is where the street-level detail lives.
What makes Medway’s tax picture distinctive
Three district-wide forces shape most of the tax work we do for Medway clients: the railway, the universities, and the building sites.
A commuter district on the high-speed line
Southeastern’s high-speed services call at Strood, Rochester, Chatham, Gillingham and Rainham on their way into St Pancras, with Rochester reached in just under 40 minutes. That connectivity has made Medway a serious commuter district, and commuter tax problems follow the season tickets home. Once income passes £100,000 the personal allowance starts to taper away, producing an effective 60% rate on the band above it, and Self Assessment usually becomes compulsory even when every pound is taxed under PAYE. Add the High Income Child Benefit Charge where one partner earns over £60,000, a share scheme at work or a side income, and a London salary earned from a Medway postcode needs more attention than a payslip suggests. We prepare those returns, use pension contributions to claw back the personal allowance where possible, and correct tax codes when HMRC’s estimates drift.
A university presence at Chatham Maritime
The Universities at Medway partnership brings the University of Greenwich, the University of Kent and Canterbury Christ Church University together on a shared campus at Chatham Maritime. A student population needs housing, and that demand feeds a private rental market running right across the district, from HMOs near the campus to family lets in Rainham. The compliance load on those landlords has grown sharply. Mortgage interest relief is restricted to a basic rate credit, residential property gains must be reported and paid to HMRC within 60 days of completion, and Making Tax Digital for Income Tax already applies to landlords with qualifying income over £50,000, with the threshold falling to £30,000 from April 2027. We keep Medway landlords compliant on all of it, whether the portfolio sits in one town or is spread across several.
Regeneration and the building trades
Medway’s waterfront has been in near-continuous redevelopment since the naval dockyard closed in 1984, and housebuilding continues across the district. That keeps the construction trades busy, and a large share of them work as subcontractors under the Construction Industry Scheme. Contractors deduct 20% from payments before subcontractors see them, or 30% for the unregistered, and those deductions routinely exceed the true liability once tools, travel between sites and materials are counted. Refunds can currently be claimed back as far as the 2022/23 tax year, and for most CIS workers we act for, a repayment is the normal outcome rather than the exception.
What a tax adviser in Medway can take off your plate
All eight of our services are available throughout the district, shaped to the situations above rather than sold as a standard bundle.
- Self Assessment tax returns. Prepared and filed for commuters, higher earners, directors and anyone HMRC has asked to file, with every deadline managed.
- Personal tax advice. Year-round planning: tax codes, the £100,000 taper, Marriage Allowance, savings and dividend allowances, and P11D benefits.
- CIS tax refunds. Returns and repayment claims for subcontractors on sites across the Medway towns, including backdated years never reviewed.
- Landlord tax returns. Rental accounts and returns for portfolios anywhere in the ME postcodes, from a single let to an HMO near the campus.
- Capital Gains Tax. Planning before a sale and the 60-day report after it, so reliefs are claimed rather than discovered too late.
- VAT returns. Registration once turnover approaches £90,000, scheme selection and quarterly filing, including the construction reverse charge.
- Making Tax Digital. Software set-up and quarterly filing for sole traders and landlords already inside MTD, and preparation for the April 2027 intake.
- HMRC investigations. Direct representation when HMRC opens an enquiry, so you are never facing the inspector alone.
This page or your town’s page?
Both are yours to use. This district page covers what Medway clients share: the commute, the rental market, the building trades. If your situation is rooted in one place, the regeneration sites around Chatham, the hospital workforce in Gillingham, Rochester’s tourist trade, start with that town’s own page, where we cover the local detail properly rather than repeating it here.
Qualified advisers, fixed fees, no surprises
Anyone can call themselves a tax adviser, because the title is not protected. Credentials are how you tell the difference. Our advisers are qualified with the ACCA and the ATT, and the practice is a registered HMRC agent, dealing with HMRC through official agent channels on your behalf. Fees are fixed and agreed in writing before any work starts. No hourly rates, no meter running on phone calls, and no invoice surprises when the job is done.
Tell us what is happening
If you are looking for a tax adviser in Medway, start with a short conversation rather than a form. Tell us what is going on: an unfiled return, CIS deductions you suspect were too high, a rental property you are about to sell in Rochester or Rainham, or a letter from HMRC you were not expecting. We will tell you plainly what needs doing, what it will cost, and how quickly it can be done, wherever in the five towns you happen to be.
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Frequently Asked Questions
You can file your own return through HMRC’s online service, and for a single PAYE income with nothing else going on, that may be enough. A tax adviser earns their fee when your affairs have moving parts: self-employment or CIS work, rental property, income over £100,000, capital gains, or child benefit at higher earnings. In those cases the common outcome is that we find allowances and expenses that self-filers miss, and we take on the deadlines and HMRC correspondence so mistakes and penalties stop being your problem. Many Medway clients come to us after one stressful January too many.
We work on fixed fees agreed in writing before any work begins, so the honest answer is that it depends on the job, but you will know the exact figure before you commit to anything. A straightforward Self Assessment return costs less than a landlord return with capital gains reporting, and both are quoted upfront. There are no hourly rates, no meters running on phone calls, and no surprise invoices at the end. Tell us what your situation involves and we will give you a firm quote, with no obligation to proceed.
Yes, where a face-to-face conversation is the right way to work. In practice most of our Medway clients prefer to handle everything by phone, email and secure document exchange, because it fits around work and avoids anyone taking a morning off to deliver paperwork. Records are shared securely, returns are approved electronically, and you can reach your adviser directly rather than through a call centre. When a meeting genuinely helps, typically for complex planning or an HMRC investigation, we arrange one at a time and place that works for you.
An accountant typically covers the full breadth of a business’s finances: bookkeeping, annual accounts, payroll and company filings, with tax as one strand among many. A tax adviser, or advisor as it is sometimes spelt, works in depth on tax itself: Self Assessment, reliefs and allowances, capital gains, and dealings with HMRC. We are personal tax specialists, qualified with the ACCA and the ATT, which means tax is not a sideline to accounts work; it is the entire practice. If your need is your own tax position rather than company bookkeeping, a specialist adviser is usually the better fit.
Yes. We are a registered HMRC agent, which means HMRC recognises the practice as authorised to act on clients’ behalf. Once you appoint us and sign the agent authorisation, we can file your returns, view the relevant parts of your HMRC record, correct tax codes and handle correspondence and enquiries directly with HMRC for you. Alongside agent registration, our advisers hold ACCA and ATT qualifications, so the people doing the work are professionally qualified in tax, not just registered to submit forms.
All five, and the villages around them. We act for clients in Strood, Rochester, Chatham, Gillingham and Rainham, right across the ME postcodes. Because most of the work runs by phone, email and secure document exchange, where you sit within the district makes no practical difference to the service. Chatham, Gillingham and Rochester each have their own dedicated page on this site with the local detail; this page exists for everything the five towns share.
Yes, and it is usually simpler that way. All of your UK rental income goes on a single Self Assessment return regardless of how many towns the properties sit in, so one adviser seeing the whole portfolio can offset expenses correctly, apply the finance cost restriction once, and track your combined property income against the Making Tax Digital thresholds. When you sell any one of the properties, we handle the 60-day capital gains report alongside the annual return.
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