The Kids' Menu VAT Cut Ends 1 September - And Kids Eat Free Never Qualified
The 5% rate on children's meals ends after 1 September. And if you ran a kids eat free offer over the holidays, HMRC treats the child's plate and the adult meal as one sale, so you were charging 20% all along whether you knew it or not.
The reduced rate ends 1 September, inclusive. From 2 September children's meals go back to 20%.
Kids eat free never qualified. HMRC's brief treats a free or £1 child's meal bought with an adult meal as one supply, standard-rated throughout.
Smaller portions of adult dishes did not qualify either. Portion size alone was never enough.
The Flat Rate Scheme was unaffected. If you are on it, nothing changed and nothing changes back.
The switch back is on 2 September
The relief covered 25 June to 1 September inclusive. On 2 September, qualifying children's meals return to 20%.
That means the EPOS goes back. Every till button, every menu price rebuilt in June, every VAT code in the accounts package. If 5% is still sitting in there on the Wednesday, you are under-declaring from the first cover of the day.
The Flat Rate Scheme was never affected by any of this, so if you are on it you carried on applying your usual percentage throughout and there is nothing to reverse.
What this means for you: The changeover falls on a Wednesday, mid trading week, not on a quiet Monday morning.
If you ran kids eat free, none of it qualified
HMRC's brief has a section on free meal promotions and it is blunt. Where a child's meal is provided free or at nominal cost as part of a single supply of catering, the whole package is normally standard-rated. It names the example outright: kids eat free, or for £1, where a qualifying adult meal is bought.
Calling something free does not decide its VAT treatment. The adult is paying for both plates.
So a food-led pub that ran the offer through August and coded those covers at 5% has under-declared. That is not a missed opportunity.
Forty family covers on a good Sunday, ten weeks of holidays, and the arithmetic gets uncomfortable quickly.
The relief only reached meals genuinely held out for sale on their own, on a children's menu, priced and presented as a child's meal. Not a small adult portion. Not a discount off the main menu.
What this means for you: Anyone who coded that promotion at 5% wants the summer figures checked before the next return, not after HMRC asks.
Where we come in
We do the VAT returns for food-led pubs, so late August is exactly when this sits on our desk.
There are two jobs before the next return. Making sure the EPOS genuinely reverts on 2 September rather than the following week. And going back through the summer to see whether anything coded at 5% should have been at 20% all along.
If you did run kids eat free and it went through at the reduced rate, that is fixable. Errors get corrected through the normal process, and the sooner it is done the better it reads.
If your children's menu was priced and presented properly on its own, there is nothing to unpick and we will tell you that in one call.
General information, not advice. Checked against HMRC Revenue and Customs Brief 5 (2026) at publication. Whether an apportionment is appropriate, and how any error is corrected, depends on your own records and pricing. Call us on 01793 677 644.
