SEISS Grant info

How much?

Claims for the third SEISS (Self-Employed Income Support Scheme) grant can be made from 30 November.

Submission time

You can submit your claim via the existing HMRC SEISS website. As before, you must submit your claim personally. Accountants or advisers are not allowed to submit the claim on your behalf. Claims can be made up to 29 January 2021 – so you have around two months.

Grant – not loan

As before, this is a grant so not refundable. It does form part of your income for tax so will be taxable when you submit your tax return and computation.

Conditions

The grant is to cover the three month period from 1 November. There are conditions and you will need to confirm that these apply when completing your claim application:

Profits must have been adversely affected by coronavirus between 1 November 2020 and 29 January 2021 (Don’t know why they are saying 29 January and not 31 January). This is more tightly defined as having “been impacted by reduced demand”. You can’t claim if the adverse affect has been because of increased costs such as having to purchase additional cleaning supplies or face masks.

Businesses which are temporarily unable to trade because of coronavirus are included.

The business must have traded in both the 2018/19 and 2019/20 tax years – so anyone who became self-employed after 5 April 2019 will be excluded.

Your 2018/19 tax return must have been submitted by 23 April 2020 – so, if you were late submitting, no grant.

Trading profits must have been £50,000 or less.

Your trading profits must be equal to or greater than your non-trading income. An example might be if you were also employed and your employment income exceeded your

You will need to declare that you intend to continue to trade and that you reasonably believe there will be a significant reduction in your trading profits. There isn’t a definition of “significant” but HMRC gives some examples

If you claim you must keep evidence of the reasons you believe your business is eligible so that HMRC can see the evidence at some point in the future.

Unfortunately, we are not allowed to submit claims on behalf of clients and the process is straightforward. If any client does require help, we are here.