Acceptable characters

Listed below are the characters that may be used when completing Self Assessment tax return forms for online filing, that are accepted by HMRC’s Self Assessment environment:

• alphabetical characters A-Z, both upper and lower case
• numerical characters 0-9
• £ - the pound-sign may be used but must be entered as £ as an alternative, you may use GBP
• & - the ampersand may be used but must be entered as &
• other acceptable characters: 

Space
(
)
*
,
- (hyphen, not underscore)
.
/
@

NO other characters will be accepted and any Self Assessment tax return which contains any invalid characters will be rejected.

Submissions that are rejected due to an invalid character will normally result in an error message being returned, identifying the offending character. However, certain characters may result in the submission becoming stuck in a 'loop' in the Government Gateway.

Stamp Duty Land Tax

There is also a list of further considerations relating to online submissions of Stamp Duty Land Tax (SDLT) returns, see 'Related links'.

PENSION SCHEMES ONLINE FILING

The acceptable characters for the online filing of pension scheme returns are as follows:

• alphabetical characters A-Z, both upper and lower case
• numerical characters 0-9
• the pound sign (£), dollar sign ($) and hash (#) NOT be used
• the ampersand (£) may be used but must be entered as &
• the apostrophe (‘) may be used but must be entered as '
• other acceptable characters:

Space
(
)
*
,
-
_
.
/
%
!
+
:
;
=
?
[
]
^
{
}
~

NO other characters will be accepted and any Self Assessment tax return which contains any invalid characters will be rejected.