The question comes up regularly, especially from founders running lean and watching every pound: what is the cheapest way to file company accounts, and do you actually need an accountant to do it?

The honest answer changed in early 2026. HMRC’s free online filing service — the one that let you submit your CT600 corporation tax return and your Companies House accounts in a single step at no software cost — closed permanently on 31 March 2026. That removes what was, for a long time, the genuinely free route that many small companies relied on.

What’s left is a spectrum: DIY with paid software at one end, a qualified accountant at the other, and a few options in between. We’ll walk through each one honestly, including what it actually costs and where the risks sit. The right answer depends on your company’s situation — and how confident you are that you understand what “straightforward” looks like through HMRC’s eyes.

Until 31 March 2026, HMRC operated a joint online filing service with Companies House that allowed directors of small limited companies to prepare and submit their statutory accounts and CT600 corporation tax return together, for free. It was basic — limited formatting, no iXBRL tagging support for complex accounts — but it worked for simple micro-entity companies, and it cost nothing beyond your time.

That service is now gone. HMRC confirmed the closure is permanent, and there is no replacement provided by the government. Going forward, anyone who wants to file online must use third-party commercial software that is compatible with both HMRC’s systems and Companies House’s filing requirements.

The practical implication: there is no longer a zero-cost route to online filing for most active limited companies. Paper filing remains technically available for some, but HMRC processes paper CT600 returns slowly, the risk of errors increases without software validation, and lenders increasingly require accounts prepared by an accountant anyway.

If you were relying on the free service and have not yet made alternative arrangements, the time to sort this is now — before your next filing deadline arrives.

For directors who are comfortable preparing their own accounts, third-party filing software is the most affordable DIY route. There are several options on the market, ranging from basic CT600 filing tools through to fuller cloud accounting platforms.

At the budget end, tools such as TinyTax offer CT600 filing from around £20 per year and handle submission to both HMRC and Companies House. That is a relatively low outlay, and for a very simple company — one with clean records, no complex transactions, and a director who understands what a profit and loss account and balance sheet should look like — it may be sufficient.

The honest caveat is that cheap software does not prepare your accounts for you. It files what you put in. If your figures are wrong, or if you have missed an allowable expense, or if you have misclassified something on the balance sheet, the software will submit those errors to HMRC without any warning. The filing will be accepted, and you will only discover the problem later — typically when HMRC opens a compliance check or when you need to refinance and a lender asks awkward questions about the accounts.

There is also the time cost. Preparing micro-entity accounts from scratch is not complicated for someone with accounting knowledge, but it takes time that most directors would rather spend elsewhere. If you are billing at any reasonable day rate, the hours can quickly outweigh the savings.

If your company traded during the year, the section above applies. But if your company was dormant — meaning it had no significant accounting transactions — the picture is simpler and cheaper.

Dormant companies are still required to file accounts with Companies House and, in most cases, notify HMRC of their dormant status. However, a dormant company balance sheet is a very short document: it typically shows only the share capital and any initial expenses, with no trading activity to reconcile.

Some dormant companies may still be able to file paper returns with HMRC under exemptions that survived the March 2026 closure, though we would always recommend confirming your eligibility before relying on that route.

For most dormant companies, the most practical and cost-effective option is a fixed-fee accountant service. At Wings, we file dormant company accounts for a flat £50 — that covers the preparation of the dormant balance sheet, filing to Companies House, and confirming dormant status with HMRC where required. For a company sitting on the shelf between projects or waiting for the right moment to trade, that is a straightforward and affordable way to stay compliant without any guesswork.

You can find more detail on what’s involved in our guide to dormant company accounts cost.

This is where the comparison gets interesting — because once you factor in software costs, your own time, and the risk of filing errors, a fixed-fee accountant starts to look a great deal more competitive than the headline number suggests.

At Wings Online Filings, we prepare and file company accounts and corporation tax returns for a flat fee of £250. That includes the profit and loss account, balance sheet, CT600 and tax computation, submission to both HMRC and Companies House, and tax planning to make sure you are not paying more corporation tax than you need to.

Compare that to the DIY route: £20 for filing software, plus the time it takes to prepare accounts from scratch (realistically two to four hours for a simple company if you know what you are doing), plus the risk that something is wrong and you do not find out until it matters.

For most active limited companies filing a single set of annual accounts, the arithmetic is closer than people expect. And because we operate entirely online, there is no overhead attached to a physical office or a lengthy onboarding process — which is exactly how we keep the price where it is.

We also back it with a price match promise: show us a written quote from another firm at a lower price and we will match it.