HMRC Awards Salesforce £2bn CRM Contract

HM Revenue & Customs has awarded Salesforce a customer relationship management contract worth up to £2bn excluding VAT, the centrepiece of a programme to rebuild how the UK tax authority deals with taxpayers and their advisers. Including VAT, the HMRC Salesforce contract is worth up to £2.4bn, according to the award notice published on the government’s Find a Tender service.

The notice names Salesforce UK Limited as the supplier and dates the award to September 8, 2026. The contract runs from September 28, 2026 to September 28, 2036, and HMRC can extend it by up to three years and then by a further two, taking the potential end date to 2041. HMRC received and assessed two tenders under the competitive flexible procedure introduced by the Procurement Act 2023, and the notice does not name the unsuccessful bidder.

Salesforce will supply a software-as-a-service CRM platform and associated professional services. Core capabilities listed in the notice include customer management, case management, messaging, marketing, artificial intelligence, insights and reporting. A second tier of additional capabilities covers identity verification, secure communications, fraud prevention, data integration and knowledge management.

HMRC first set out its plans in a preliminary market engagement notice on April 22, 2025, which estimated the contract at £1bn excluding VAT, or £1.2bn including VAT, with a planned start date of February 2, 2026. The final award doubles that estimate and begins almost eight months later than first planned. The earlier notice already allowed for a potential 15-year term ending in 2041.

That 2025 notice placed the platform at the core of HMRC’s Enterprise Customer Relationship Management programme, which it said was intended to modernise customer interactions and help close the tax gap. HMRC estimated the tax gap, the difference between the tax it expects to collect and what it actually receives, at 6.4%, or £59.2bn, for the 2024 to 2025 tax year. The notice also said further implementation partners would be procured separately once a software vendor had been chosen.

The HMRC Salesforce contract is designed to work alongside a second award made earlier this year. On April 27, 2026, HMRC awarded Capgemini UK a Contact Centre as a Service contract worth £500m excluding VAT and £600m including VAT, with Route 101 and NiCE Systems UK as subcontractors and NiCE named as the contact centre software vendor. That contract runs from May 15, 2026 to May 14, 2034, with two optional one-year extensions.

Capgemini and CGI IT UK were the two finalists from 13 initial participants in a five-phase process, according to the Capgemini award notice. The April 2025 CRM notice said the new platform would need to integrate with a future contact centre service. Taken together, the two awards commit HMRC to spending of up to £2.5bn excluding VAT, or £3bn including VAT, on customer contact technology over roughly the next decade.

The awards follow sustained criticism of HMRC’s telephone service. The National Audit Office reported in May 2024 that callers waited nearly 23 minutes on average during the first 11 months of 2023-24, up from five minutes in 2018-19. It found that HMRC answered 20.5 million calls out of 38 million call attempts in 2022-23, and that callers spent a combined 798 years on hold that year.

The audit body classified 72% of calls in 2023-24 as failure demand, up from 65% in 2018-19. Failure demand is contact caused by something going wrong earlier, such as a customer chasing progress on an existing query.

HMRC says its performance has since improved. Its 2026 transformation roadmap update states that more than eight in 10 calls were answered throughout 2025-26, that customers were answered more quickly than in the previous year, and that customer satisfaction across its contact channels averaged around 80%. The same update says 78% of customer interactions in 2025-26 went through automated or digital self-serve channels, up from about 65% in 2020-21, and HMRC is targeting at least 90% by 2030.

The roadmap identifies the new CRM as a route to more personalised support for customers and their advisers, though it does not specify which adviser services will run on the system delivered under the HMRC Salesforce contract. It sets out separate changes aimed at tax agents, including a single digital front door for tax adviser registration opened in May 2026 and changes to call routing on the Agent Dedicated Line. Multi-factor authentication for agents is planned toward the end of 2026-27.

The CRM build coincides with the rollout of Making Tax Digital for Income Tax, which made quarterly digital reporting mandatory from April 6, 2026 for sole traders and landlords with qualifying income above £50,000. More than 350,000 businesses had signed up by April 2026, according to HMRC’s roadmap update. The threshold falls to £30,000 in April 2027 and £20,000 in April 2028, bringing more taxpayers, and the agents who act for them, into HMRC’s digital systems.

The award notice does not set out a rollout date for the new platform. HMRC has not published a timetable for when taxpayers or agents will first use the system built under the HMRC Salesforce contract.