What counts as R&D for tax relief.

It is an advance in overall knowledge or capability in a field of science or technology, not just something new to your company. The Government's guidelines also treat an appreciable improvement to an existing process, material, device or service as an advance. Simply using science or technology does not by itself count as an advance. The project must set out to extend what is known or possible.

Uncertainty exists when knowledge of whether something can be done, or how, is not readily available or deducible by a competent professional working in the field. It may concern the product itself or the system it sits in. The project is R&D if the work directly contributes to resolving that uncertainty, so the uncertainty should be named specifically in the claim.

It is a professional working in the field with the knowledge and experience to judge whether an answer was readily available or deducible, and so whether there was uncertainty. The Government's guidelines do not define the term separately, so in practice we identify who in your team fits that description and what they would have known. Their view, set out in the technical narrative, anchors the whole claim.

It has to be an advance in overall knowledge or capability in the field, not merely new to the company. Something that already exists and is readily available to a competent professional is not an advance just because you have not built it before. It does not need to be a world first, but it must go beyond the state of knowledge in the field.

Yes, if the improvement is appreciable and achieving it involved scientific or technological uncertainty. Routine copying or adaptation of an existing product does not qualify. The question is whether you had to work out how to do something that a competent professional could not simply have looked up or deduced. A good project description makes that difference visible.

Not usually. Building features with known tools and techniques is ordinary development. Software work qualifies when it tries to achieve something a competent professional could not readily say was possible, or how, such as a new technique or an unproven combination of components. The Government's guidelines treat routine copying or adaptation as outside R&D.

No. Uncertainty about whether customers will buy, how a product should look, or what it will cost is commercial. R&D uncertainty is scientific or technological: whether the thing can be made to work at all, or how. Many projects have both kinds, and only the technological work counts. Good claim writing separates them carefully.

The Government's guidelines deal with the start and end of R&D at paragraphs 33 to 35. Broadly, R&D begins when work starts to resolve the uncertainty, and ordinary preparation, such as general market research or planning, is not R&D itself. Identifying the true start date matters because costs before it may not qualify, and costs of qualifying indirect activities may follow different rules.

Broadly, when the uncertainty has been resolved and the work moves on to routine development or production. Work after that point, such as scaling up a proven process, is not R&D. The end point must be argued from the facts of the project, and it can sit earlier than companies expect. Paragraphs 33 to 35 of the guidelines cover this.

They are activities that support the R&D but are not themselves R&D, such as certain administrative or supporting work. The guidelines list them at paragraphs 31 and 32 and the list is closed: if an activity is not on it, it is not a qualifying indirect activity. Different rules apply to the costs of these activities, for example for data and cloud costs.

Yes. Mathematics has been treated as science for R&D purposes from April 2023, so a project seeking an advance in mathematics, or one that uses mathematical advances to resolve technological uncertainty, can qualify. Before that date the treatment was narrower. As ever, the project must still involve genuine uncertainty and a competent professional must find it unresolved.

No. The guidelines exclude the arts, humanities and social sciences, including economics, from the meaning of science. A project in those fields cannot be R&D, however innovative. A project that is technological but touches those subjects, such as a software platform for economists, can still qualify if its technology is uncertain.

It can, where the difficulty lies in making the whole system work. The guidelines recognise system uncertainty at paragraphs 29 and 30: uncertainty arising from how components interact, even when each component is known. Simply connecting products that are designed to be connected is routine, so the claim must show what could not be predicted.

No. A patent is evidence that an invention was new and inventive, but the test for R&D relief is separate. A project can qualify without a patent. A granted patent can support the technical narrative, and it matters for the Patent Box, but it does not settle the claim, and the absence of one does not rule it out.

The guidelines address project boundaries at paragraph 19. A project is a coherent set of activities directed at a single advance, and the boundary should follow that objective rather than the company's internal budgets or product names. Where a large programme contains separate technical aims, we split it so each claimed project stands on its own evidence.