Selling a UK holiday let: the sixty-day capital gains deadline

The records you will wish you had kept

Improvements are where the money hides and where the paperwork is thinnest. A new kitchen installed in year three, a loft conversion in year six, a rebuilt terrace after a storm: owners remember them, but the invoices are in a box in a garage or in a defunct email account. Ten years of holiday-let ownership generates a lot of spending, and the difference between a documented improvement and a remembered one is the difference between a deduction and a dispute.

Our advice is unglamorous and it works. Open one folder the day you buy, drop every capital invoice into it, and never move it. The sixty-day deadline is survivable if the numbers already exist. It is brutal if you spend forty of those days looking for a builder's receipt from 2019.