HMRC’s Transformation Roadmap was first published in July 2025, setting out a five-year vision for a more efficient, modernised and automated tax and customs system. The progress update that followed — first published on 2 July 2026 and most recently updated on 27 July 2026 — reports on the first year of delivery against that roadmap and sets out priorities for 2026 to 2027.
It is organised around three stated priorities: improving day-to-day performance and customer experience, closing the tax gap, and reform and modernisation — with a fourth section covering the newly integrated Valuation Office. Buried inside the reform and modernisation chapter is the commitment most relevant to customs and trade: continued work on the Customs Declaration Service (CDS) and the Goods Vehicle Movement Service (GVMS), running alongside a steady, department-wide push into AI.
This article pulls out what the update actually says about customs, puts the department-wide numbers in context, and separates the changes already in effect for traders from the ones worth watching rather than acting on yet.
HMRC’s stated ambition is for at least 90% of customer interactions to take place digitally by 2030. The update reports that 78% of interactions were digital in 2025 to 2026, up from around 65% five years earlier. Supporting that shift, the HMRC app reached 7.6 million unique users in 2025 to 2026, up from 5.9 million the year before, with a public target of 10 million unique app users by March 2027.
Self Assessment payments made through the app in January 2026 reached £818.8 million, more than 60% higher than the £499 million recorded in January 2025. Customer satisfaction with HMRC’s digital services averaged around 80% through the year.
| Metric | Prior period | 2025 to 2026 | Stated target |
|---|---|---|---|
| Digital interaction share | ~65% (2020 to 2021) | 78% | 90% by 2030 |
| HMRC app unique users | 5.9 million (2024 to 2025) | 7.6 million | 10 million by March 2027 |
| Self Assessment payments via app (January) | £499 million (Jan 2025) | £818.8 million (Jan 2026) | — |
| Microsoft Copilot licences issued to staff | — | 28,000+ (by March 2026) | 50,000 during 2026 |
| Additional compliance officers recruited | — | 1,600 in 2025 to 2026 (2,100+ cumulative) | 5,500 by 2029 to 2030 |
Inside the reform and modernisation chapter, HMRC commits to continuous improvement of its customer-facing customs digital services, specifically the Customs Declaration Service (CDS) and the Goods Vehicle Movement Service (GVMS). The update describes this as targeted enhancements to strengthen CDS functionality and resilience, alongside work making it easier for customers to submit information and access goods movement updates through GVMS.
HMRC confirms systems improvements will continue throughout 2026 to 2027, framing this as ongoing, iterative work rather than a single completed milestone or a fixed delivery date. No CDS replacement is announced, and no release schedule or feature list is spelled out.
HMRC states that CDS facilitated the movement of over £1 trillion of trade in goods in 2024 to 2025, placing it among the highest-volume digital services HMRC operates, alongside PAYE and Self Assessment. Any resilience or usability improvement to a platform processing trade at that scale has a direct, practical effect on declarants, freight forwarders and hauliers filing day to day — even where the update itself does not spell out specific features or a release schedule.
AI adoption runs through nearly every chapter of this update, both as an internal productivity tool and as a customer-facing feature. It helps to read the two lanes separately: one is about how HMRC staff work, the other is about what customers — including traders — will actually see.
HMRC completed what it describes as one of the largest rollouts of Microsoft Copilot licences in UK government, issuing more than 28,000 licences to colleagues by March 2026 for tasks such as drafting and summarising documents, emails and meetings, with plans to scale to 50,000 during 2026.
Separately, HMRC has built testing environments using AI-generated synthetic data, allowing new AI tools to be trialled without exposing real customer data, and has piloted AI call summarisation to draft notes from customer calls automatically, with a human reviewer kept in the loop throughout. Customer service colleagues are also being given interactive AI simulators to practise difficult call scenarios in a safe environment.
HMRC’s customer-facing AI assistant, “Ask HMRC”, recorded over 6.3 million interactions during 2025 to 2026, and work is underway to make it more conversational, allowing customers to ask questions in their own words rather than navigating fixed menus.
A new Contact Centre as a Service platform, with embedded AI capability, is also planned to help manage call queues and give more accurate wait times. And for traders specifically, the Online Trade Tariff is set to move from a static reference into an AI-assisted, journey-based service (see below).
The most relevant AI commitment for traders sits inside the Online Trade Tariff programme. HMRC describes plans to move the tool from a static reference resource into what it calls a smarter, journey-based service, integrating AI tools to make tariff information easier to access, understand and use. That work is framed explicitly as supporting businesses through the import and export process, sitting alongside the CDS and GVMS improvements described above rather than as a separate initiative.
Three further commitments round out the customs and trade picture in this update — and unlike the CDS and GVMS work, two of them already have dates behind them.
The customs and AI commitments sit inside a much larger document. HMRC also reports a tax gap of 6.4% for 2024 to 2025, equivalent to £59.2 billion, broadly stable and below the 7.5% recorded when measurement began in 2005 to 2006, alongside a compliance yield target of £50.4 billion for 2025 to 2026. Investment continues in compliance headcount, with over 2,100 additional compliance officers recruited toward a target of 5,500 by 2029 to 2030.
And in April 2026, the Valuation Office formally became part of HMRC, bringing Council Tax and business rates valuation under the same transformation programme, with its own digital-first targets running to 2030. None of that changes the CDS and GVMS commitments directly, but it explains where customs modernisation sits within HMRC’s broader priorities: one workstream among several competing for the same investment and delivery capacity.
For businesses filing customs declarations, the practical takeaway is continuity rather than a step change. HMRC has not announced a CDS replacement or a fixed date for a major platform overhaul; it has committed to ongoing resilience and usability work through 2026 to 2027, alongside a slower-moving shift toward AI-assisted tariff guidance. That is a reasonable posture given the volume CDS already carries, but it also means declarants should not expect the interface or core workflow to change overnight.
The more immediate developments worth tracking are the ones with dates already behind or just ahead of us:
Whatever pace HMRC’s own systems evolve at, the platform used to interact with CDS and GVMS day to day still carries most of the practical burden of getting a filing right. Customs Declarations UK’s CDS import and export declarations sit alongside integrated GVMS functionality — generate a GMR in a minute, linked directly to the declarations you already file — plus guided workflows and real-time validation, so that HMRC’s own resilience improvements are matched by a platform layer built to the same standard.
As HMRC moves the Online Trade Tariff toward AI-assisted guidance, having accurate, validated commodity and procedure data already flowing through a declarant’s own system will make that transition easier to absorb rather than something to react to.
This update is best read as a status report rather than an announcement of anything new for customs specifically. CDS and GVMS improvements continue as committed, AI adoption is scaling steadily rather than transformatively, and the more concrete near-term changes for traders — digital ATA Carnets and simplified Temporary Admission — are already in effect. The CDS and GVMS resilience commitment carries no fixed delivery date, which makes it worth revisiting when HMRC next reports progress.
HMRC’s first roadmap progress report promises continuity on CDS and GVMS through 2026 to 2027, a steady AI build-out led by the Online Trade Tariff, and two customs changes — digital ATA Carnets and simplified Temporary Admission — that are already live.
All figures above are as stated in HMRC’s Transformation Roadmap: update 2026. Source: HM Revenue & Customs, HMRC Transformation Roadmap: update 2026, first published 2 July 2026, updated 27 July 2026.