Free tool
R&D tax relief calculator
Entitlement calculator
Estimate what your R&D is worth
Enter the costs behind your technical work for one accounting period. We apply the current rules, including the 65% restriction on unconnected subcontractors, and show the working.
Gross salary, employer NI and pension for the time spent solving the technical uncertainty.
Usually claimable at 65% of the invoice for unconnected parties, which we apply for you.
Licences, compute and datasets used directly in the R&D, apportioned to the project.
Materials, reagents, prototypes and a fair share of light, heat and power.
Payments to trial participants and other categories HMRC allows.
Does the work qualify? Five questions HMRC will ask.
- Were you resolving a technical or scientific uncertainty a competent professional could not simply look up?
- Was the work aiming at an advance in the field, not just new to your company?
- Was the work carried out mainly in the UK, or by UK-based staff and contractors?
- Is the claimant a UK limited company paying corporation tax?
- Can you evidence the project timeline, the people involved and the costs?
What counts as R&D for tax purposes
HMRC is not asking whether the work was clever. It is asking whether a competent professional in your field faced genuine uncertainty about how, or whether, something could be achieved, and whether the attempt sought an advance in the field overall. Building a product is not automatically R&D. Solving the parts nobody could tell you how to solve usually is.
- Usually qualifies: novel algorithms and model architectures, new materials or formulations, process engineering at unproven scale, integrating systems in ways with no established route, prototypes that repeatedly failed before they worked.
- Usually does not: configuring off-the-shelf software, cosmetic product updates, market research, routine testing, and work where the answer was already published.
Turn the estimate into a claim
A free 20-minute call confirms the scheme, the qualifying costs and what the claim is realistically worth before you commit to anything.