With the Autumn Budget scheduled for 26 November 2025, the whispering around Westminster is growing louder. For advisers and estate planners, the speculation isn’t just academic — any changes to inheritance, gift, trust or capital gains tax regimes could affect the work you do for clients. In this post we summarise and suggest what you should be discussing with your clients now as it’s important that decision paralysis doesn’t unnecessarily expose clients who may be holding back with a ‘wait and see’ approach. We still need to be moving clients forward with their estate planning to unsure families are not unnecessarily exposed.

What’s Driving Pressure on the Chancellor

Before diving into rumours, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the context in particular that the government must meet strict fiscal rules and close budget gaps against a backdrop of weak economic growth and higher borrowing costs.  The government has signalled that it will, where possible, avoid raising headline rates of income tax, VAT or employee National Insurance — pushing the burden instead more onto wealth, property, capital business and agricultural taxation. Meanwhile, existing tax receipts from inheritance tax continue to climb (thanks in part to frozen thresholds and rising property values).

So, if sweeping new taxation is required, changes to the IHT / gifts / trust regime are among the more politically feasible levers.

What You Should Be Talking About with Clients Now

Given the level of uncertainty, your role as adviser is to help clients manage risk, not chase speculation. Here are some actions worth considering now:

1. Review and stress-test existing estate/gift plans
   Evaluate whether clients’ gift strategies, trusts, or lifetime planning rely heavily on the “as is” regime. If changes reduce their effectiveness, having early alternatives in place can preserve optionality.
2. Bring forward crystallisations or gifts (where practical and legally safe)
   If a client is on the margin of a gift or disposal, it might make sense to act sooner rather than later, especially if there’s a real risk that the rules will tighten.
3. Check and update wills, trusts, and trust-based will provisions
   Ensure that any existing or new will planning has some flexibility and ‘safety nets’ built in for any contingency planning to future proof clients as much as is feasible.
4. Focus on client communication and expectation setting
   Clients will be worried by rumour. Provide clarity: explain that changes may not come (or may be deferred), but planning now can reduce exposure. Use scenario analysis to illustrate what differing tax regimes mean.
5. Watch consultation windows closely
   Often, changes arrive via consultations, not sudden headline reforms. Be ready to comment and position clients during those windows — and feed insight back into your planning.
6. Reassess non-pension versus pension asset allocations
   If pension assets may face future inclusion in estates, you might want to rebalance allocations between pension and non-pension holdings, especially in high-net-worth clients.
7. Review business and agricultural property relief dependency
   Particularly for family businesses and farms, evaluate how reliant the client is on reliefs that might be scaled back. In some cases, pre-emptive restructuring may be worth considering.

Words of Caution

Speculation is not policy. Many of these ideas may never see the light of day, or may be watered down through consultation. Don’t rush poorly conceived planning. The last thing you want is clients pursuing aggressive planning that backfires under new rules or is challenged by HMRC. Flexibility is key. The best structures will allow adaptation to shifting rules — building in triggers, alternative paths, or fallbacks. Stay visible to clients.. Regular review cycles, communication, and scenario planning will be critical.

Final Thoughts

The Autumn Budget 2025 could well introduce material changes in the inheritance and succession space the core fundamentals of estate planning remain robust – we don’t want a situation where clients sit and wait for potential change and in the meantime they pass away or lose capacity with no planning in place.

As advisers and estate planners, your job now is not to predict every twist, but to prepare resilient strategies and guide clients through uncertainty. The window for doing so is closing — now is the time to act, review, and stress-test.