With the Budget due on 28 October 2026, the next few weeks are a genuinely useful window to look at your finances properly, rather than reacting to whatever gets announced afterwards. None of the five things below depend on knowing what’s in that Budget – they’re worth doing regardless – but a few of them get harder to act on retrospectively once the tax year has moved on.
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1. Check whether you’re leaving pension tax relief on the table
The pension Annual Allowance is £60,000 for most people, tapering down to as little as £10,000 if your adjusted income is above £260,000. What a lot of people don’t realise is that unused allowance can be carried forward from the previous three tax years, provided you were a member of a registered pension scheme in each of those years. If you’ve had a higher-earning year, received a bonus, or come into some money you’re considering putting toward retirement, this is worth checking before assuming you’re capped at this year’s £60,000 alone. It’s particularly worth checking if you’re a higher or additional-rate taxpayer, since the tax relief on a larger contribution is worth more to you than it would be to a basic-rate taxpayer making the same payment – and unused allowance from three years ago drops off the back of the queue once this tax year ends, so it isn’t something that waits indefinitely.
2. Use this year’s ISA allowance while it’s still this year’s
The £20,000 ISA allowance doesn’t roll over – unused, it simply disappears at the end of the tax year rather than adding to next year’s. It’s also worth reviewing the mix between Cash and Stocks & Shares ISAs now rather than later, given the amount you’ll be able to put into a Cash ISA falls to £12,000 for under-65s from April 2027. If cash forms a large part of how you use your ISA allowance, that’s a change worth planning around ahead of time rather than discovering at the deadline.
3. Find out where fiscal drag is already affecting you
Income Tax, Inheritance Tax, ISA and Capital Gains Tax thresholds are all frozen well into the early 2030s, which means more of your income and wealth is being pulled into tax each year without a single rate having risen. We’ve set out exactly which thresholds are frozen and by how much elsewhere – worth a read if you haven’t checked recently, since several of these numbers have moved further than most people realise. None of it is reversible after the fact – a threshold you were pulled over during the tax year stays crossed regardless of what a future Budget does next, so this is one to check now rather than after your tax return arrives.
4. Make sure your portfolio could handle another wobble like this year’s
The FTSE 100 fell around 10% in March 2026 before recovering to a fresh all-time high within four months – a genuinely useful reminder of why diversification, and not reacting to a downturn in the moment, tends to matter more than trying to predict the next one. If you haven’t reviewed how spread out your investments actually are across sectors and regions since then, we’ve written more on what this year’s swings can teach investors, and it’s a reasonable prompt to check your own portfolio against it.
5. Revisit what your plan is actually for
It’s easy for a review like this to become a checklist of allowances and thresholds, and miss the point they’re all supposed to serve. Whether that’s your own retirement, or supporting family in a way that doesn’t put your own plans at risk, it’s worth checking the goals themselves are still the right ones before optimising the detail underneath them.
Let’s go through your own position
We work with clients across Poole, Bournemouth and the wider Dorset area to go through exactly this kind of review, ahead of the Budget and at any other point in the year it’s useful. If you’d like to talk through your own finances before the end of October, get in touch and we’re happy to have a no-obligation conversation.
This guide is for general information only and does not constitute advice. The information is aimed at retail clients only. All information is correct at the time of writing (September 2026) and is subject to change in the future.
The value of your investments (and any income from them) can go down as well as up and you may not get back the full amount you invested. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance.
A pension is a long-term investment not normally accessible until 55 (57 from April 2028). The fund value may fluctuate and can go down, which would have an impact on the level of pension benefits available.
The Financial Conduct Authority does not regulate tax planning.