Fresh data provides evidence that the amount raised from IHT is continuing to increase. Receipts reached £5.8 billion ($7.75 billion) in the first eight months of the 2025/26 tax year. (Source HM Revenue & Customs.) That’s £84 million higher than the same period last year, continuing a steady grind higher for more than two decades, with tax bands frozen while asset values have increased – the “fiscal drag” impact.

Earlier this year the Office for Budget Responsibility, the group advising the UK government on the state of public finances, forecast that IHT would raise £9.1 billion this 2025/26 tax year. IHT thresholds are frozen and will remain so until at least April 2031. The “nil rate” band is set at £325,000, with amounts over that level liable to 40 per cent tax.

Other figures show that with capital gains tax (CGT), there was a modest 4 per cent rise in revenues for April to November this year, at £1,583 million.

“The Budget confirmed that inheritance tax is already one of the government’s most dependable revenue raisers,” Isaac Stell, investment manager at , said: “Inheritance tax looks set to remain an increasingly important and reliable source of revenue for the Treasury for the foreseeable future.”

(See wealth managers' reactions to the Budget). 

Editor's note: As far as this news service viewed it, the wealth management industry, which tends to be relatively neutral in its language, was generally angry about the direction of policy – with some exceptions. There are worries that Reeves’ tax hikes on dividends, for example, will hurt small firms, or that higher income tax burdens via freezing thresholds will stifle work and enterprise. In the background is a worry that the UK is suffering from weak growth, low real investment, sticky inflation and weak productivity. Unless these problems are resolved, the country will fall into a “doom-loop” of deteriorating public finances, calls for higher tax, and sluggish growth.