Most UK express trusts must be registered with HMRC's Trust Registration Service (TRS) — including trusts that pay no tax at all — and the deadline is 90 days from the date the trust is created. Registration is done online by the trustees or an agent, and failure can bring a penalty of up to £5,000. Yet years after the rules widened, we still meet trustees who have never heard of the register, usually because the trust was set up long ago, does nothing very active, and nobody told them the law changed.
Here is who has to register, who is let off, and what trustees have to keep doing after the first filing.
Who must register
The TRS started life as an anti-money-laundering register for taxable trusts, then expanded to cover almost all UK express trusts regardless of tax position. Under the current rules, registration is required for:
- UK express trusts — trusts deliberately created by a settlor (by deed, declaration or will), whether or not they have any tax to pay, unless a specific exclusion applies
- Any trust with a UK tax liability — income tax, capital gains tax, inheritance tax or stamp taxes, including non-UK trusts with UK source income or UK assets
- Non-UK trusts that acquire UK land, or that have at least one UK trustee and enter a business relationship with a UK adviser, bank or agent
An "express trust" is broader than people expect. A discretionary trust in a will that carries on beyond the estate administration, a declaration of trust over a rental property held for adult children, an old family settlement holding a few thousand pounds of shares — all express trusts, all in scope unless excluded.
The exclusions worth knowing
Parliament carved out a list of trust types that do not need to register while they stay non-taxable. The ones that come up most often in practice:
- trusts imposed by statute or court order (intestacy trusts, for example) — these are not express trusts at all
- will trusts, for the first two years after death
- trusts of life insurance policies and death-in-service benefits that only pay out on death, illness or disability
- registered pension scheme trusts
- charitable trusts
- co-ownership trusts where the trustees and beneficiaries are the same people — the classic joint ownership of a home
- bank accounts held for minor children
Two traps hide in that list. First, an excluded trust that becomes liable to tax loses its exclusion and must register. Second, the will-trust exemption is a grace period, not an exemption: if the trust is still running two years after death, it registers.
What changed on 30 June 2026
The rules were amended in mid-2026, and the changes cut both ways. On the tightening side, non-UK trusts that bought UK land before 6 October 2020 and still held it on 30 June 2026 — previously outside the net — are now required to register, with a deadline of 1 September 2027 (HMRC's service cannot yet actually take these registrations, so the obligation is one to diarise, not to action today). On the relaxing side, new exclusions arrived — including one for genuinely small trusts, but note it is a strict all-conditions test, not a size threshold: the trust must hold no UK land, no asset of appreciable worth over £2,000, property never cumulatively exceeding £10,000, income of no more than £5,000 a year, and no UK tax liability — and only one trust per settlor can use it. Alongside sit new exclusions for Scottish survivorship arrangements and a two-year breathing space for certain trusts arising on death, including deed-of-variation trusts. If you concluded in the past that a trust did not need registering, the answer is worth re-checking against the new rules rather than assuming it still holds.
Deadlines, updates and the annual duty
For trusts created now, the rule is simple: register within 90 days of creation, or of the trust becoming liable to tax. Changes to the registered details — a new trustee, a change of beneficiary class, a new agent — must also be reported within 90 days of the change.
Taxable trusts have an ongoing duty on top: confirming annually, when the tax return is filed, that the register is up to date. Non-taxable trusts have no annual declaration, but the 90-day update rule still applies, which in practice means someone has to remember the register exists every time the trust changes shape. Building that into the trust's annual review is the only reliable way it happens.
Penalties: modest on paper, expensive in context
HMRC's stated penalty for failing to register is up to £5,000 per trust, though its published approach is to warn first where the failure is not deliberate. That has led some trustees to treat the TRS as optional. We would not. Trustees are personally responsible for the trust's compliance, an unregistered trust increasingly cannot function in the real world — and "HMRC will probably only warn us" is not a line that reads well in a trustee minute.
The practical enforcement is quiet but effective: banks, solicitors, accountants and other regulated firms must collect proof of registration before taking a registrable trust on as a client, and must report material discrepancies between what the register says and what they see to HMRC. An unregistered trust that tries to open an account, instruct a solicitor on a property sale, or engage an adviser hits a wall precisely when it needs to move.
How registration actually works
Registration runs through HMRC's online service. A lead trustee (or an agent) sets up a Government Gateway organisation account for the trust and supplies details of the settlor, trustees, beneficiaries and — for taxable trusts — the trust's assets. Beneficiaries named in the deed are listed individually; a class of beneficiaries ("my grandchildren") can be described as a class until a member receives a benefit.
Once registered, the service produces a proof-of-registration document, which is what banks and advisers will ask for. Taxable trusts also receive a Unique Taxpayer Reference for the trust's self assessment returns — a separate thing from registration, and a separate set of deadlines.
None of it is difficult for someone who does it regularly; all of it is fiddly the first time, especially reconstructing settlor details for a trust created decades ago. This is bread-and-butter work for our trust tax team, usually bundled with the trust's returns and annual review.
The bigger picture for trustees
The TRS is a symptom of a wider shift: trusts now live in a world of registers, proofs and 90-day clocks, and passive trusteeship has stopped being a safe default. If the trust you look after has not been reviewed since the rules changed — for registration, for the 2026 amendments, or for inheritance tax planning that may be years out of date — a single review meeting usually settles all three. Our inheritance tax and estate planning team and probate specialists work alongside the trust tax side for exactly this.