Short answer: if you buy things to sell on, and your gross sales pass £1,000 in a tax year, you probably need to tell HMRC. If you're clearing out your own wardrobe, almost certainly not. Everything else in this post is the detail between those two positions.

This is general information, not tax advice. Tax rules change and everyone's situation is different. Check GOV.UK or speak to an accountant before making decisions about your own case.

The Vinted panic, and what actually changed

In early 2024 a wave of headlines convinced half the country that HMRC had invented a new "side hustle tax". It hadn't.

What changed is reporting. Since January 2024, digital platforms like eBay, Vinted and Depop have been required to collect information about their sellers and report it, along with income figures, to HMRC under international platform-reporting rules. HMRC can now see roughly what you sold and for how much, without asking you.

The tax rules themselves did not move. If you didn't owe tax on your selling before 2024, the reporting rules didn't create a bill. What they did create is visibility, which means the sellers who were quietly trading over the threshold are now much more likely to get a letter. That's the whole story.

Selling your own stuff is not trading

If you're selling things you bought for yourself and no longer want, that is not trading. Old clothes, a console you've finished with, the exercise bike that became a clothes rail. You bought them to use, you used them, you're selling them on. Generally no income tax, no matter how much they fetch, and no £1,000 limit to worry about.

You'll usually get back less than you paid anyway, which is rather the point. HMRC is not interested in your loft clearout.

One caveat: individually valuable items (art, jewellery, certain collectibles) can fall under separate capital gains rules when sold. That's a different regime with its own thresholds, and it's worth a look on GOV.UK if you're selling anything genuinely expensive. For a normal second-hand clearout it almost never comes up.

Buying to resell usually is trading

The moment you buy something in order to sell it for more, the picture changes. That's trading, and trading income is taxable.

HMRC doesn't rely on a single test. It looks at what are called the "badges of trade": a set of pointers that, taken together, suggest you're running a business rather than decluttering. Things like:

Intention. Did you buy it planning to sell it on?
Frequency. One sale looks like a clearout. Forty a month looks like a shop.
Quantity. Nobody buys six identical pairs of trainers in different sizes for personal use.
Modification. Cleaning up, repairing or bundling items to make them sell for more.
Speed. Buying Saturday, listing Sunday.

No single badge decides it. But if you're reading a reselling blog, sourcing stock and flipping it, you already know which side of the line you're on. Most resellers are trading, and that's fine. Trading is legal. It just comes with paperwork.

The £1,000 trading allowance

Here's the bit that saves most casual sellers: the UK has a trading allowance of £1,000 of gross trading income per tax year. The tax year runs 6 April to 5 April.

If your total trading income, and that means gross sales, not profit, stays at or under £1,000 for the year, you generally don't owe tax on it and don't need to report it. Sell, say, £800 of flips in a year and HMRC doesn't need to hear from you.

Two things people get wrong about it:

It's gross, not profit. For example: £1,200 of sales with £900 of costs is over the allowance, even though you only cleared £300.
It's per tax year, across all your trading. eBay plus Vinted plus car boots all count towards the same £1,000.

Full details are on the GOV.UK trading allowance page. Note that if you go over the allowance, you can either deduct the £1,000 from your income or deduct your actual expenses, but not both. For most genuine resellers, actual expenses will be far higher than £1,000, so tracking them matters.

When Self Assessment kicks in

Once your gross trading income goes over £1,000 in a tax year, you'll normally need to register for Self Assessment and file a tax return.

The registration deadline: 5 October after the end of the tax year in which you started. So if you started trading in February 2026, that falls in the tax year ending 5 April 2026, and you'd need to register by 5 October 2026. You register on GOV.UK, it's free, and it's a form, not an interrogation.

Registering doesn't automatically mean a big bill. It means you declare your figures and pay whatever's actually due, which for a small side income can be modest or nothing.

What you'd actually pay

Deliberately no numbers here, because rates, the personal allowance and National Insurance thresholds shift with budgets, and any figure I print goes stale. The current ones are on GOV.UK.

The shape of it is stable though: you pay income tax on your profit, not your revenue. Sales minus cost of stock, minus platform fees, minus postage, minus legitimate business expenses. You also have a personal allowance and, above certain profit levels, National Insurance to think about. Someone with a full-time job and a small reselling side income is taxed on the reselling profit on top of their salary, which is why the profit figure, not the sales figure, is the one that decides how much this all costs you.

Get the profit number wrong and you either overpay or underdeclare. Neither is great.

Keep records all year, not in a deadline panic

Every reseller who's filed a return knows the failure mode: the filing deadline is days away, and you're reverse-engineering a year of sales from PayPal emails and a half-abandoned spreadsheet. The maths is miserable because the records were never kept, and you end up guessing at costs you paid nearly a year ago.

The fix is boring and it works: log every order when it happens. What you paid, what it sold for, the platform's fee, the postage, plus running expenses like packaging and mileage. Do that all year and your tax return is an afternoon, not a fortnight. It's also your defence if HMRC ever queries a figure, because now that platforms report your income, the number on your return needs to survive comparison with the number they hold.

This is the actual reason I built Reseller OS: a desktop tracker that does the per-order fee and profit maths, with everything stored locally on your own machine. It's in beta with a waitlist open, but honestly, the tool matters less than the habit. A spreadsheet kept religiously beats good software used never.

The short version

Selling your own unwanted stuff: generally not taxable. Buying to resell: trading. Under £1,000 gross in a tax year: covered by the trading allowance. Over it: register for Self Assessment by the 5 October deadline and declare your profit. And keep records as you go, because HMRC already has the sales side of the ledger.

Again: general information, not tax advice. Rules change, edge cases exist, and your situation is yours. Check GOV.UK or ask a qualified accountant before acting on any of this.