Getting Started
Getting Set Up as a New Uber Driver
Nobody hands you a manual when you pass your Uber assessment. There is one thing you actually have to do straight away — tell HMRC you're self-employed — and a handful of things worth doing in your first few weeks that save real money later.
5 Oct
Registration deadline
Following the tax year you started in
£1,000
Trading allowance
Income below this needs no return
~10 days
UTR arrival, online
Longer by post
31 Jan
First bill due
Not immediate on registering
The Problem
The problem: the deadline is easy to miss because nothing forces you to notice it
Uber does not register you with HMRC. Nobody does it for you. You have to tell HMRC yourself that you have started self-employment, and there is a real deadline attached to it: 5 October following the end of the tax year in which you started driving. Start in November 2026 and the deadline to register is 5 October 2027 — later than most new drivers assume, but a genuine deadline all the same.
Miss it and you can be charged a "failure to notify" penalty, calculated as a percentage of the tax you owed late — even if you would have owed very little. Drivers who register a few months late almost never have a real problem; drivers who never register and get found later do.
The other thing nobody mentions: registering does not create an immediate bill. Your first payment is not due until the following 31 January. What it should trigger, from week one, is a habit of setting money aside — not a panic.
What we do for you
- HMRC self-employment registration handled for you, correctly and on time
- Your UTR chased and confirmed once HMRC issues it
- A straight answer on whether you're even over the trading allowance yet
- A weekly savings figure worked out from your actual statements
- Records and a mileage log set up properly from day one
- A clear answer on when your first bill actually lands and for how much
What registering actually involves
You register once, online, as self-employed. HMRC then posts you a Unique Taxpayer Reference (UTR) — a ten-digit number that identifies you for Self Assessment and that you will use every year from now on. It typically arrives within about ten working days online, longer if you register by post.
Registering is not the same as filing a return. It simply puts you in the system so that, after the tax year ends, you can file the return that reports what you actually earned.
Do you even need to register yet?
If your total self-employed income for the tax year — gross fares, before any expenses — is under the £1,000 trading allowance, you generally do not need to register or file at all. Plenty of very part-time drivers sit under this comfortably.
Cross that figure and registration is required regardless of how small your actual profit turns out to be, because the trading allowance is tested against income, not profit. We check your real numbers before telling you either way — guessing in either direction costs you.
The habit that matters more than the paperwork
The single most useful thing a new driver can do is start setting money aside from the first payout, not from the moment a tax bill appears. As a rough starting rule of thumb we tell new drivers to put aside around 25% of what Uber pays them into a separate account, then refine that figure once we've seen a few months of real statements.
Do that from week one and 31 January becomes a formality. Skip it and the same money has usually been spent by the time the bill lands.
Records worth starting immediately
Nothing elaborate — just habits that are far easier to build now than to reconstruct in a year's time.
- Keep every Uber and Bolt weekly statement, not just a running total
- Photograph fuel and other receipts as you go rather than keeping paper
- Start a mileage log from your very first shift — date, start/end point, business purpose
- Open a separate account for the tax you are setting aside, so it is never mixed with spending money
This is also the cheapest moment to get advice
Decisions made in your first few weeks — how you keep records, whether you register at all yet, what you set aside — are far easier to get right from the start than to unwind a year later. We would rather have this conversation now than after your first return.
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