HMRC awards Salesforce a ten-year CRM deal worth up to £2.4B

HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) has awarded Salesforce a contract worth up to £2.4 billion including VAT to supply the UK tax collector with customer relationship management software and related services for at least ten years.

What the deal covers

The department selected Salesforce for a software-as-a-service CRM platform and a set of related capabilities: customer and case management, marketing campaigns, messaging, reporting, analytics and AI. Other functions, including identity verification, fraud detection and data integration, may be supplied by third parties.

The contract runs until September 2036. Extensions of up to five years could take it to 2041.

Two bids, and a rising price tag

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

HMRC initially estimated the procurement at £1 billion during preliminary market engagement in April 2025. The later 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 updated customer service platforms, including a future Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) system.

Why the overhaul

The award is part of a wider replacement of HMRC's customer-facing technology. In April the department gave Capgemini a contact-centre-as-a-service contract worth up to £600 million including VAT, also running up to ten years and intended to integrate with the new CRM platform.

The work follows years of complaints about HMRC's customer service. In 2025 the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee accused the department of deliberately degrading its telephone service to push taxpayers online. The committee found phone performance had reached an all-time low in 2023-24: during the first 11 months of that financial year HMRC disconnected nearly 44,000 callers who had spent 70 minutes waiting, because its system could not cope with demand. Only two-thirds of calls were answered and the average wait was more than 23 minutes. An earlier National Audit Office report found callers collectively spent 798 years on hold during 2022-23.