How Many Landlords Earn Over £50,000 Per Year?

• Only 1.33% of UK rental properties (about 36,824) generate £50,000+ annually, mostly in London, but many landlords will exceed the threshold because they have several properties in a portfolio.
• Government data shows 2.86 million UK landlords with 45% owning one property, 38% owning 2-4 and 17% owning 5 or more properties.
• Our analysis estimates that up to 33% of landlords may earn £50,000+ gross rental income yearly.

Making Tax Digital (MTD) is a UK government programme to move businesses and individuals onto a fully digital system for keeping tax records and filing returns.

MTD requires taxpayers within scope to keep digital records and use compatible software to send tax information to HMRC directly.

It replaces the current system where taxpayers instead use the HMRC self assessment online service or paper-based SA100 form.

The government’s objectives are to close the tax gap – the difference between tax due and tax collected – and reduce errors.

The government introduced MTD for all VAT-registered businesses starting from their first VAT period on or after 1 April 2022.

Before this date, only VAT-registered businesses with taxable turnover of £85,000 or more needed to use it.

MTD for income tax will apply first to individuals – sole traders and landlords – registered for self assessment with qualifying income from self‑employment and/or property income above set thresholds.

From the tax year starting 6 April 2026, MTD for income tax becomes mandatory for landlords whose combined qualifying income from self‑employment and property is more than £50,000 per year. This amount is based on the figures in their 2024/25 tax return.

The scope will expand later to those with income over £30,000 from April 2027 and over £20,000 from April 2028 as shown in Table 02.

MTD is for unincorporated individual landlords (not companies) who complete a self assessment.

Property income received via a limited company is outside MTD for income tax, because it is subject to corporation tax rules instead.

Using proprietary data from Bricks&Logic, we can see that only 1.33% of rental properties in the UK produce more than £50,000 of rental income per year – the calculations for this shown in Table 02.

Using estimates based on Bricks&Logic data, Table 02. suggests how many rental properties in the UK provide £50,000 rental income individually.

Rental properties are those with an EPC within the last 10 years where the description was ‘Rental - Private’

As we can see, 1.33% of all rental properties have an annual rental value in excess of £50,000 per annum and that these properties are highly concentrated in London.

However, as many landlords have more than one property (of varying rental valuations) in their portfolio, we need to do some further calculations to estimate how many will need to start using MTD in April 2026.

Many landlords have portfolios of property which taken together can exceed the £50,000 threshold. 

By analysing Bricks&Logic data we can estimate the number of properties across England & Wales which fall into each rental value band. (Table 03.)

Table 04. shows that according to Government statistics, there are approximately 2.86 million landlords and according to the English Private Landlord Survey 2024, 45% own 1 property, 38% own 2-4 properties and 17% own 5 or more properties.

For the purposes of this estimation, we will assume that the 38% of landlords with 2-4 properties can be split into 12.7% owning 2, 12.7% owning 3 and 12.7% owning 4 properties.

We will also assume that no landlords own more than 5 properties. as the number of landlords exceeding that is relatively small.

If we then further assume that every portfolio (regardless of the number of properties it contains) has the same likelihood of containing a property in each value band, then we can show how many landlords fall above the threshold of £50k in rental earnings per year in Table 05.

This would result in approximately 33% of all landlords exceeding the £50k threshold for MTD.

To produce our estimate we have made some assumptions which are listed below. It is likely that our estimate is an upper limit on the actual figure.

• We have excluded the very large landlords and distributed their property throughout the landlords owning 1-5 properties. While this is a very small number of landlords, it is a substantial number of rental properties which means we are probably over estimating the total size of the market owned by the 1-5 property landlords.
• We have made no allowance for property owned by companies and simply distributed all rental property among the private landlords with 1-5 properties. Clearly a large number of landlords operate as private companies and therefore will not be affected by these changes.
• We have assumed that every landlord, whether small or large, has the same chance of owning all types of property. This could be very incorrect but we have no data to improve the estimates.

If you found this article useful, take a look at our full blog for further analysis. Recently we have covered:

• How many houses in the UK are worth over £2m?
• Property portfolio: how to build a property portfolio
• Build to Rent: what is Build to Rent in the UK?
• How long does the Land Registry take to update property sales data?
• Leasehold vs Freehold: what are the differences?
• EPC rating meaning and how to improve EPC ratings

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