HMRC bets up to £2.4B on Salesforce for taxpayer CRM overhaul

Ten-year deal covers customer records, case management, portals, analytics, and AI, with extensions possible to 2041

Salesforce has won a contract worth up to £2.4 billion including VAT to provide the UK tax collector with CRM software and related services for at least ten years.

HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) selected Salesforce to supply a software-as-a-service CRM platform and related capabilities including customer and case management, marketing campaigns, messaging, reporting, analytics, and AI. Additional functions, including identity verification, fraud detection, and data integration, may be supplied by third parties.

The contract runs until September 2036, with extensions of up to five years potentially taking it to 2041.

REG AD

The contract award notice says HMRC received two final bids. Salesforce beat Pegasystems, better known as Pega, whose platform also combines low-code development, automation, and AI.

REG AD

HMRC initially estimated the procurement at £1 billion during preliminary market engagement in April 2025. The subsequent tender put its potential 15-year value at £2 billion excluding VAT, or £2.4 billion including it. That notice said the new CRM system would need to "seamlessly integrate with [the] updated customer service platforms, including the future Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) … directly enhancing taxpayer interactions, streamlining services, and reducing administrative burdens."

The Salesforce award forms part of a broader overhaul of HMRC's customer-facing technology. In April, the department awarded Capgemini a contact-center-as-a-service contract worth up to £600 million including VAT. The agreement could also run for ten years and is intended to integrate with the new CRM platform.

The overhaul follows years of complaints about HMRC's customer service. In 2025, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) accused the department of deliberately degrading its telephone service to push taxpayers toward online channels.

The PAC found that phone performance had reached an all-time low during 2023-24. During the first 11 months of that financial year, HMRC disconnected nearly 44,000 callers who had spent 70 minutes waiting for an adviser because its system could not cope with demand. Only two-thirds of calls were answered, and the average wait time was more than 23 minutes.

An earlier National Audit Office report found that callers collectively spent 798 years on hold during 2022-23. ®