How Much Do Year-End Accounts Cost for a Domiciliary Care Agency in the UK 2026/27?

The short answer: what year-end accounts cost for a domiciliary care agency

Year-end accounts and the Corporation Tax return for a limited company home care agency start at around £1,200 a year and rise to roughly £3,500 for a larger or multi-branch group. That is the standalone annual fee for the compliance job. Bundle the same work into a full care-finance plan and it sits inside a monthly fee from £299.

Those are LOYALS list prices, checked against our published fee schedule on the day this was written. A single-director agency filing accounts and a CT600 sits at the £1,200 tier. Add a director Self Assessment and payroll setup and you are around £2,200. A group running two or three branches through associated companies, with consolidation and a tax planning review, sits at roughly £3,500.

Turnover is not really the driver here. A home care agency turning over £600,000 with clean monthly records can cost less to finalise than one turning over £300,000 whose books are a shoebox of council remittances and carer timesheets. What moves the fee is the care-specific work sitting underneath the accounts, which is where a generalist quietly undercharges and then gets it wrong. If you want the wider picture of what a specialist does across the whole year, our guide on care agency accountants and the outsourced finance function sets out the full service.

What year-end accounts actually cover for a limited company care agency

Year-end accounts for a limited company are three separate filings, not one. There is a set of statutory accounts for Companies House, a Corporation Tax computation and CT600 return for HMRC, and the annual confirmation statement. Most owners think of it as "the accounts", but the fee pays for all three plus the work behind them.

The statutory accounts are your balance sheet and profit and loss, prepared under a UK reporting standard (FRS 105 for a micro-entity, FRS 102 Section 1A for a small company). Most single-branch agencies qualify as micro or small, but the framework choice matters: micro-entity accounts are thin, and a council commissioner, a lender, or the Care Quality Commission (CQC) looking at your financial position under Regulation 13 will often want the fuller FRS 102 presentation that actually shows your accrued income and creditors.

Your Corporation Tax return is the CT600, filed with HMRC, with a computation that turns your accounting profit into taxable profit. For 2026/27 Corporation Tax is 19 percent on profits up to £50,000, 25 percent above £250,000, and an effective 26.5 percent on the slice between. Get the profit figure wrong, by missing accruals or mis-stating the payroll cost, and you either overpay or invite a correction.

Last comes the confirmation statement, the annual Companies House filing that confirms your directors, shareholders, people with significant control and registered office. It is cheap and quick, but it is a filing that carries its own deadline, and it is the one owners most often forget when they try to do year-end themselves. The mechanics of all three sit in our annual accounts and Corporation Tax service.

The three deadlines behind the fee

A limited company care agency has three year-end deadlines, and they do not all fall at once. Your statutory accounts are due at Companies House 9 months after your year end. Your Corporation Tax is due to HMRC 9 months and 1 day after the year end. Your CT600 return is due 12 months after the year end. So you usually pay the tax before you file the return that calculates it, which catches out owners doing this alone.

Take a 31 March year end as an example, the most common one for care agencies. Your accounts are due at Companies House by 31 December. Your Corporation Tax payment is due by 1 January. Your CT600 is not technically due until the following 31 March, a full three months later. Sensible practice is to finalise everything together by the 9-month point so the tax you pay matches the return you file, rather than paying an estimate and correcting it. HMRC sets these dates out in its guidance on Company Tax Returns and their deadlines, and Companies House does the same for preparing and filing annual accounts.

Miss the Companies House accounts deadline and the penalty starts at £150 and climbs to £1,500 the longer you are late, and it doubles if you file late two years running. Miss the Corporation Tax payment and HMRC charges interest from day one. None of this is exotic, but for an owner running rotas, chasing council remittances and covering shifts, the dates slide, and a specialist who files on your behalf simply removes the risk.

Why a care agency's year-end costs more than a corner shop's

A domiciliary care agency carries accounting complexity a retailer never touches, and that complexity is the real reason the fee sits where it does. Four things in particular drive the work, and each one is a place a generalist quietly gets it wrong.

Accrued council and ICB income. Councils and Integrated Care Boards pay in arrears, often 30 days or more after the month the care was delivered. At your year end there will be a stack of delivered but unbilled hours sitting between the rota and the sales ledger. Those hours are income you have earned and must accrue, and getting the number right needs the roster reconciled to the payroll paid hours. Miss it and your accounts understate both revenue and profit, which is a strange kind of error because it flatters your tax bill while making the business look weaker to a lender or the CQC.

Irrecoverable VAT under the welfare exemption. Care provided by a CQC-registered domiciliary agency is an exempt welfare supply under HMRC VAT Notice 701/2. Exempt is not the same as zero-rated: it means you charge no VAT, but you also cannot reclaim the VAT on what you buy. That input VAT does not disappear, it sits inside your cost of sales in the accounts. A generalist who treats you like a standard-rated business gets the whole cost base wrong. If you also run an introductory or staff-supply arm, that side is standard-rated at 20 percent and has its own £90,000 registration clock, which the accounts have to separate cleanly.

Travel-time minimum wage in the staff cost. Time a carer spends travelling between visits counts as working time for the National Minimum Wage, which is £12.71 an hour from 6 April 2026. The payroll figure in your accounts has to reflect that paid travel time, plus rolled-up holiday pay at 12.07 percent and employer National Insurance at 15 percent above the £5,000 secondary threshold. Book the staff cost at contact hours only and your profit is overstated, your tax is too high, and your accounts do not match the reality the CQC expects a well-led provider to understand.

The director's loan account. Owner-run agencies almost always have a director's loan account, and it is the single most common thing a rushed year-end gets wrong. If you owe the company money at the year end and it is not repaid within 9 months and 1 day, the company pays s455 tax at 35.75 percent on the overdrawn balance for 2026/27, refundable only when you clear the loan. A specialist watches this all year and plans the position before the year end rather than discovering it after.

Pay once a year or spread it monthly?

The cheaper invoice is not always the cheaper answer. A standalone year-end job at £1,200 to £3,500 looks like less than a monthly plan, but it only covers the accounts and the CT600. It leaves the bookkeeping, the payroll and the management figures through the year to you or a separate provider, and it means the accounts are reconstructed after the fact rather than built from clean records.

A full care-finance plan from £299 a month bundles the year-end into the monthly fee, so the accounts are simply a tidy-up of records that were already right. For most agencies past a handful of carers, that route costs less in total once you count the accrual work, the payroll compliance and the CQC-ready reporting a specialist does through the year. It is the difference between paying someone to fix a year of guesses and paying someone to keep it right as you go. We break the running costs down further in our guides on bookkeeping cost for a domiciliary care agency and management accounts cost, and the whole-relationship view in how much an accountant costs for a domiciliary care provider.

One more point on structure. If you still trade as a sole trader rather than a limited company, you do not file statutory accounts or a CT600 at all. You file a Self Assessment return instead, which we price from £495 a year. Most agencies incorporate as they grow, both for limited liability and because councils prefer to contract with a company, and the point where the maths tips is covered in sole trader versus limited company for a domiciliary care provider.

What this means for you: getting year-end right

If your year end is coming up, a handful of actions make the difference between a clean, low-stress filing and a scramble that overpays tax.

1. Reconcile the roster to your paid hours now. The gap between hours rostered, hours delivered and hours billed is where your accrued council income lives. Pull it together before year end, not after.
2. Check your director's loan account. If you owe the company money, plan to clear it, or expect s455 tax at 35.75 percent until you do. This is the one that surprises owners most.
3. Confirm the VAT position. If you run any introductory or staff-supply work alongside the care, make sure it is separated and that you are watching the £90,000 clock on that arm only.
4. Get the staff cost right. Travel time, rolled-up holiday and employer National Insurance all belong in the figure. Booking contact hours only overstates profit and tax.
5. Decide standalone or monthly before, not after. If you are relying on a separate bookkeeper through the year and a one-off accountant at the end, price the bundled route. It usually wins on total cost and always wins on stress.
6. File everything at 9 months. Do not split the accounts and the tax. Finalise both at the earlier deadline so the tax you pay matches the return you file.

None of this is clever tax planning. It is doing the ordinary things properly, at the right time, for a business that HMRC, Companies House and the CQC all watch. Done right, the year-end is boring, which for a care business is exactly what you want it to be.

Run a care agency? Our care agency accountants run the whole finance function, from monthly bookkeeping and payroll through to the year-end accounts and CT600, on one predictable fee so the numbers are always CQC-ready and filed on time.