The 5% VAT Rate on Children's Meals and Family Attractions Ends on 1 September 2026: Your Exit Checklist

On 1 September 2026, the temporary 5% VAT rate on children's meals and family attractions comes to an end. Since 25 June 2026, children's meals, children's admission tickets and entry to family attractions have been charged at 5% rather than the standard 20%. 1 September is the last 5% day; from 2 September the standard rate is back.

Going in was the easy half. Everyone remembers to switch a rate down. Switching back up is where the errors live, because nothing about it feels urgent to anyone except HMRC — which has said so plainly, warning in its Guidelines for Compliance that failure to remove temporary system changes may increase the risk of VAT being underdeclared. Underdeclared VAT is your liability, not your customer's: if your till is still charging 5% on 3 September, you owe the difference whatever you collected.

This is not an explainer on the reduced rate. It is the exit: what to do in the 48 hours either side of 1 September, and — because doo.FINANCE is an Odoo Gold Partner as well as an accountancy practice — which settings do the work.

What ends on 1 September, and what never started

The reduced rate applies to supplies from 25 June 2026 to 1 September 2026 inclusive. 1 September is still a 5% day. 2 September is not. Three categories are in scope, and they do not behave the same way:

• Children's meals — held out for sale only as a meal for a child, normally on a distinct children's menu, and consumed on the premises. Takeaway never qualified, and a meal including an alcoholic drink does not count.
• Children's tickets to cinema screenings, performances, shows, concerts and exhibitions, marketed, priced and presented as a child's admission. A family ticket sold for a single price including at least one child admission qualifies in full, adults included.
• Admission to qualifying attractions — here the rule differs: the reduced rate applies to the admission charge for any customer, regardless of age. Theme parks, zoos, adventure parks, soft play, museums, observation attractions.

The legislation does not define a child, so HMRC treats a child as anyone under 18 years of age. And two things the relief never covered: sport, and pay-per-ride attractions — admission to the park qualifies, the ride you pay for at its gate does not.

The date that catches people out is the admission date, not the sale date

HMRC's wording is precise: the reduced rate applies to a right of admission for a date falling between 25 June 2026 and 1 September 2026 (inclusive), and *"tickets bought during the period for admission on or after 2 September 2026 remain subject to the standard rate"*.

Read that against your ticketing platform. A ticket sold on 24 August for a half-term visit in October is standard-rated, at 20%, in the middle of the relief period. Most booking engines rate from the transaction date, because that is what they do every other year. Very few rate from the date of the event being booked.

So the exit checklist starts before 1 September, not after: pull a report of every forward booking taken since 25 June for an admission date on or after 2 September, and check what rate went through. Children's meals are simpler, because the meal is supplied when it is eaten — a children's main at lunch on 1 September is 5%, the identical plate on 2 September 20%.

The 48-hour exit checklist

1. Reprogramme the till and the invoicing module for 2 September

• List every place the 5% rate can be applied: EPOS product records, the booking engine, the eCommerce catalogue, recurring invoice and quotation templates, any summer price list.
• Make the change between trading sessions, not mid-service — a rate that moves while a till is open is a day of reconciliation you will not enjoy.
• Do not delete the reduced-rate tax code — you need it live for the return covering the relief period. Do disable the children's-menu items and ticket types that existed only for the relief.
• Test with real transactions before you open. Check the VAT line, not the gross price — an inclusive price looks identical whichever rate sits behind it.
• Keep the evidence: who changed what, when, and who approved it — a named control point in HMRC's guidelines, not housekeeping.

2. Clear the bookings and deposits that straddle the date

Forward bookings taken during the relief for an admission on or after 2 September should have been standard-rated all along. If your system rated them at 5%, you have under-declared, and the correction belongs in your VAT account with a documented calculation.

Prepayments taken at 20% before 25 June for admissions inside the window could be re-rated, with the adjustment made *"in your VAT account on or after 25 June 2026"*. If you took that option, the next sentence is the one with teeth — *"where a customer has prepaid and VAT is recalculated at the reduced rate, any overpaid VAT should be passed back to the customer"*. You do not keep it. Build the refund into the same exercise as the adjustment and keep the two linked — an adjustment with no matching refund is exactly what a compliance check looks for.

3. Retire the party packages and promotions, or re-price them

Where a package is a single supply, the VAT liability applies to the package as a whole — so a party package bundling children's meals or admission with an entertainer, a party bag or a photographer *"will usually be standard-rated"*. The reduced rate applies only where all elements are eligible and no additional goods or services are included.

Where they are genuinely supplied separately, the reduced rate can apply to those elements, and a single price across separate supplies may need *"a fair and reasonable apportionment"* — with a record of how it was calculated. The same logic disposes of most "kids eat free" mechanics: a children's meal given free, or for £1, with a qualifying adult meal is normally a single supply of catering, standard-rated in full.

The practical action: list every package and promotion introduced for the relief, and settle each one in writing — retires on 1 September, or continues at 20% — before the autumn marketing goes out.

The two exclusions that were never in scope

The flat rate scheme. HMRC could not be clearer: *"these changes do not affect the Flat Rate Scheme. If you use the scheme, continue to apply your current percentage to calculate your VAT liability."* If someone reduced your flat rate percentage in June, that is an error to correct now, not a discovery to make at the year end.

The Tour Operators' Margin Scheme. *"The temporary reduced rate does not apply to margin scheme supplies under Tour Operator's Margin Scheme (TOMS)."* That catches more businesses than the name suggests: any venue selling packaged admission alongside accommodation, transport or a third-party experience can fall into TOMS. Neither exclusion needs an exit action if you got it right in June — both need a correction if you did not.

Setting the exit up in Odoo: fiscal positions, tills and deposits

Here is the part the tax alerts will skip. A VAT rate change is a systems change, and in Odoo it comes down to a few specific settings — not one rate you edit in one place.

Odoo has no date-effective VAT rate. A tax record carries no start or end date, and neither does a fiscal position. Nothing switches itself off at midnight on 1 September — a named person has to do it, and should be named before the August bank holiday weekend, not after.

Use a fiscal position, not the product records. The UK localisation module (l10n_uk) ships a VAT100-ready tax structure in which the non-headline rates are created but inactive — the 5% tax is switched on in Accounting → Configuration → Taxes. For a temporary rate the clean pattern is a fiscal position mapping 20% to 5%, because reversing one is a single record rather than every item on the children's menu.

In Point of Sale, the fiscal position is the only lever you have. Odoo's documentation is explicit that in POS the taxes assigned to products are applied directly to the order and *"cannot be changed except by a fiscal position"*. So the exit happens in Point of Sale → Configuration → Settings → Accounting: reset the Default fiscal position, and remove the reduced-rate position from the Allowed list too. Leaving it in Allowed is how 5% survives into September — a till operator can still pick it mid-service, and nothing will object.

Then the places people forget. The eCommerce and booking catalogue follows the same fiscal position rules automatically; sales orders, quotations and draft invoices raised earlier do not — they keep the tax that was on them. Deposits are the sharpest edge: a down-payment invoice carries the rate it was issued at, so re-rating one means a credit note against the deposit, the VAT difference refunded, and the balance invoiced at the correct rate — documents linked, so the trail survives a review.

Build the exception report before you need it. Odoo's tax grids let you filter the tax return for anything posted at 5% with a date from 2 September onwards. Run it on 3 September, at month end, and before you file — three minutes each time, and the cheapest control in this article. For how the UK localisation should be set up in the first place, see our guide to Odoo accounting configuration and compliance in the UK.

Documenting the exit under GfC8

HMRC published a section of its Guidelines for Compliance specifically about this relief, and its final part is titled *"VAT compliance after 1 September 2026"* — in effect, HMRC publishing the exit checklist it expects to see. Its control points:

• responsibility for implementing and monitoring the reduced rate is clearly assigned;
• an implementation plan covers system changes, staff guidance and review;
• systems are configured to apply the correct VAT treatment after 1 September 2026;
• products, discounts and tax codes tied to the reduced rate are disabled or amended;
• evidence is retained showing how the rate was applied and then withdrawn — and, under MTD for VAT, that evidence has to sit in your digital records with the digital links intact, not in a spreadsheet alongside them;
• reviews and testing confirm the changes have gone and the standard rate is back.

They are not law, and following them is not a defence in itself. What they do is describe what reasonable care looks like to whoever may assess your return — and *"failure to take reasonable care"* was the largest behavioural component of the UK tax gap in 2024 to 2025, at 35% of the total. A one-page memo naming an owner, listing the settings changed and attaching the test transactions is little writing against that.

Frequently asked questions

Disclaimer: This article is for general information only and does not constitute tax or legal advice. VAT treatment depends on the specific facts of each supply, and error-correction thresholds and procedures are set by HMRC and change over time. Please consult a qualified adviser before making any adjustment to a submitted return.