As of 13 August 2026, AI cannot prepare your UK Self Assessment tax return.

What to actually do

1. Hand it to a person

   The route this page recommends

   Someone with a licence or accountable authority has to sign this before it counts.

2. Use a tool built for this

   Second choice

3. Do it yourself

   The distant third

   A chat interface gets you a draft, but you cannot verify it yourself. That is the catch.

   How to actually do it

   1. Open your HMRC records and the current GOV.UK Self Assessment guidance, then note the relevant tax year and whether you have employment, self-employment, property, savings, investment, foreign or other income.
   2. Gather your P60 or P45, bank and savings statements, dividend statements, pension records, property records, invoices, business expenses, mileage evidence and previous tax return, keeping source documents together by income or expense type.
   3. Remove unnecessary personal identifiers from copies, then paste the prompt and the relevant figures or document extracts into a chatbot without asking it to submit the return.
   4. Paste each AI-produced figure table into a spreadsheet and compare every amount with the named source document, recalculating totals independently.
   5. Use GOV.UK to check the required sections, deadlines and current guidance for the tax year, and mark every relief, expense classification, foreign-income treatment or missing item that you cannot verify.
   6. Send the organised records and unresolved questions to a qualified tax accountant before entering claims or figures into HMRC, then make any submission through the official HMRC service yourself or through that accountant.

   Prompt

   Help me organise information for a UK Self Assessment tax return for the tax year [tax year]. Do not file anything, do not claim that an expense or relief is allowable, and do not invent missing figures. Use only the records and facts I provide. First list the information and documents needed for my circumstances: [sole trader, director, property income, savings or investments, employment, foreign income, or other relevant circumstances]. Then create a table with these columns: return section, figure or fact needed, amount or answer from my records, source document, confidence, and information still missing. Keep income types and expenses separate, show all arithmetic, preserve the original currency where relevant, and flag anything that may need a tax accountant rather than deciding it. Quote the exact record used for every figure. At the end, produce a list of unresolved questions and a separate checklist of items I must compare with the current GOV.UK Self Assessment guidance before entering anything into HMRC. Treat every unconfirmed item as unknown.

   Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.