HMRC's R&D tax credit statistics: the 2026 release and the full series

Companies made 40,325 claims for UK R&D tax relief in 2024-25, according to HMRC’s September 2026 statistics. That is 17% fewer than in 2023-24 on HMRC’s revised figures, while relief rose 5% to £8.20bn. Counted by company size, HMRC puts large companies’ relief at £4.6bn and SMEs’ at £3.6bn. On LimestoneGrey’s calculation from HMRC’s tables, 2024-25 is the first year since 2015-16 in which large companies received more relief than SMEs. This page sets out the 2024-25 figures, gives the figures for every UK region, including Wales, and hands you the whole series as a file to download and use.

The headline numbers

The most recent release is September 2026, covering the 2024-25 financial year. The 2024-25 figures are provisional: HMRC has added an estimate for claims it has not yet received. The same release revised 2023-24 upwards, so every change below is measured against the revised 2023-24 figures, not the ones published a year ago. Measured against last year’s first estimates (46,950 claims, £7.56bn of support, £46.1bn of expenditure), the same figures would read as claims down 14%, support up 9% and expenditure up 11%, so a comparison quoted elsewhere may differ from ours for that reason alone.

Two movements run through the data, and they point in opposite directions. A third, error and fraud, sits outside it.

Participation fell again. Claims fell from 48,610 to 40,325, a drop of 17%. HMRC estimates that, across every scheme, claims by SMEs fell 19% while claims by large companies rose 4%, so the companies that stopped claiming were again overwhelmingly smaller ones.

R&D spend and relief rose. Qualifying expenditure rose 7% to £51.0bn, and total relief rose 5% to £8.20bn. Fewer companies claimed, on more R&D. Average support per claim rose from about £160,000 to about £203,000. HMRC puts that rise down mainly to the largest claims: claims worth more than £2m rose from 495 to 560, and the relief they carried from £3.32bn to £4.03bn. It was also the first year in which the 20% rate under RDEC, the scheme that covers the largest claimants, applied to a full year of expenditure.

The first-time-claimant number carries a caveat that is easy to miss. HMRC uplifts its headline claim counts to allow for returns it has not yet received, but it does not uplift the first-time-applicant table, so the latest year’s figure always starts low and rises as late returns arrive. Last year’s release put first-time applicants in 2023-24 at 3,765; this year’s puts the same year at 5,250, still down 43% on 2022-23 and the fifth consecutive annual fall. HMRC has left its partial 2024-25 first-time figure out of its own chart, and so do we. Its table does show 5,850, already above 2023-24, but 4,530 of those sit in the RDEC and merged RDEC column, against 1,845 a year earlier, in the first year of the merged scheme. HMRC does not comment on the figure; it is not uplifted and is not comparable with earlier years.

Separately, error and fraud fell. These statistics do not measure it, but HMRC’s own estimate fell from 17.6% in 2021-22 to 6.4% in 2023-24, based on random enquiries into SME claims and a review of large-company RDEC claims. Its July 2026 annual report puts an illustrative 5.3% on the two years since — an estimate, not a measurement.

Read together: fewer companies are claiming, on more R&D. A fall in the number of claimants says nothing about whether a particular company’s work qualifies. HMRC also checked around one in six claims in 2023-24, the most recent year it has published, so a claim has to be able to stand up to a check; our guide to HMRC enquiries explains what that scrutiny looks like in practice.

Our analysis of the September 2026 release reads the first merged-scheme and ERIS figures in detail.

Take the data

We have tidied HMRC’s published tables into one machine-readable file, free to download and use:

• CSV — www.limestonegrey.com/data/rd-statistics.csv
• JSON — www.limestonegrey.com/data/rd-statistics.json
• Field descriptions and HMRC’s caveats — README.txt
• Sub-region league table — all 46 UK sub-regions ranked on relief and claims, with its own CSV and JSON

It holds 10,384 rows, one per financial year, breakdown and measure. Claims, cost of support and qualifying expenditure, split by scheme, region, sub-region, industry sector, region-and-sector, two-digit industry division and claim size band. The national series runs from 2000-01 to 2024-25; HMRC’s 2026 tables start at 2016-17, so the earlier years are carried forward unchanged from its 2025 tables, where they were final. The regional, sector and claim-size breakdowns cover 2021-22 to 2024-25, and the sub-regional, region-by-sector and two-digit division breakdowns cover 2023-24 and 2024-25: the years HMRC now publishes them for. We model and recalculate nothing: every row is a published HMRC figure exactly as HMRC published it, and every row names the HMRC worksheet and the exact cell it came from, so any number here can be checked against the government file in one step.

The source data is Crown copyright, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0, and this compilation goes out under the same licence. The licence requires you to acknowledge the source, and the line “Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0” does that. Please also credit LimestoneGrey and link to this page, so your readers can check any figure against the HMRC cell it came from. Suggested citation: LimestoneGrey, HMRC R&D tax credit statistics, www.limestonegrey.com/rd-tax-relief/statistics/.

What the statistics measure, and what they leave out

Each release counts claims made under the R&D reliefs for a single financial year, the total relief claimed against them, and the qualifying R&D expenditure behind them. HMRC then splits those totals by scheme, by industry sector and by the region in which the claimant company is registered.

The figures lag. Each release covers a year that closed well before publication: the September 2026 release covers 2024-25. A release therefore describes claims for periods that ended between eighteen months and two and a half years before publication, and 2024-25 mixes claims under the old schemes with claims under the current ones. HMRC also rounds every figure independently to the nearest 5 claims or £5 million, which is why the parts of a table do not always add up to its total.

One number people expect to find in the statistics is not in them. HMRC’s estimates of error and fraud in the R&D reliefs are published separately, in its approach-to-R&D-reliefs papers and its annual report and accounts. Both sources are linked at the foot of this page.

Where the relief goes: every UK region

HMRC allocates each claim to a region using the postcode of the company’s registered office, and warns that this “might not correspond to where the R&D activity takes place”. A group registered in London running its laboratory in Swansea counts as London here. Read the table as a map of where claimant companies are registered, not of where UK research happens. To see how your own area ranks, our sub-region league table puts all 46 UK sub-regions in order on 2024-25 relief and claims.

Shares and averages are LimestoneGrey’s, calculated from HMRC’s published claim counts and support totals. London, the South East and the East of England between them account for just under half of all UK claims.

The map and each area’s figures can be embedded on another website: embed the map or your area’s figures.

Wales: a steady share of the claims, a smaller share of the money

The registered-office caveat matters here more than anywhere. A company doing its research in Wales but registered as part of a group elsewhere appears under that group’s region rather than under Wales, and the reverse holds too. With that stated, here is what the table shows.

Welsh-registered companies made 1,205 claims in 2024-25 for £130m of support. On LimestoneGrey’s calculation from HMRC’s tables, companies registered in Wales made 3.0% of UK claims and took 1.6% of UK support in 2024-25.

LimestoneGrey calculates that, against HMRC’s revised 2023-24 figures, Welsh claims fell 19.7%, from 1,500 to 1,205, against 17% across the UK: the second-steepest fall of the 12 UK regions, after the West Midlands at 22.3%. LimestoneGrey also calculates that Welsh relief rose 4%, from HMRC’s revised £125m for 2023-24 to £130m in 2024-25. Measured against HMRC’s first estimate of 1,440 Welsh claims for 2023-24, published in September 2025, LimestoneGrey calculates the fall in Welsh claims to 2024-25 at 16.3%.

On LimestoneGrey’s calculation from HMRC’s tables, Wales has held roughly 3% of UK claims in every one of the four years HMRC publishes regionally, so its share of claimants has been stable. LimestoneGrey calculates that Wales’s share of UK support has not been stable: about 2% in 2021-22 and 2022-23, falling to 1.6% in 2023-24 and staying there in 2024-25.

The table uses the four years in HMRC’s September 2026 tables, which revised the earlier years, so some figures differ from those we published from the 2025 release. The averages per claim are LimestoneGrey’s, calculated from HMRC’s published claim counts and support totals.

The average Welsh claim and the average UK claim have pulled apart. On LimestoneGrey’s calculation from HMRC’s tables, the average claim in Wales was worth about 70% of the UK average in 2021-22 and about half in 2024-25: roughly £108,000 against roughly £203,000. Both averages rose over the period, but the UK figure rose far faster. The regions pulling it up are visible in the table above: the average claim exceeds £200,000 in the East of England, the South East, London and the West Midlands, and the first three of those between them take almost two-thirds of all UK support.

HMRC publishes two further cuts. Within Wales, South East Wales accounted for 640 of the 1,205 claims and £80m of the £130m; Mid and South West Wales for 330 claims and £20m; North Wales for 230 claims and £30m. And by industry, Wales is more of a manufacturing claimant base than the UK as a whole. Manufacturing accounted for 450 of the 1,205 Welsh claims in 2024-25. On LimestoneGrey’s calculation from HMRC’s tables, manufacturing made up 37.3% of Welsh claims, against 27.5% across the UK. LimestoneGrey calculates that information and communication, 27.1% of claims nationally, accounted for 15.4% of claims in Wales. HMRC publishes sub-regional figures for all 46 UK sub-regions, and our sub-region league table ranks every one of them on the 2024-25 figures from HMRC’s September 2026 tables, with the HMRC worksheet and cell behind each figure.

If you are a Welsh company weighing up a claim, our Cardiff and Wales R&D tax page covers the practicalities.

Scheme, sector and claim size

2024-25 is the first year with figures for the merged scheme and ERIS, and it is a transition year. The new schemes apply to accounting periods beginning on or after 1 April 2024, so most of the year’s claims were still made under the old SME and RDEC schemes. The merged scheme received 6,840 claims worth £1,425m, 91% of them from SMEs. HMRC reports ERIS in one column with the old scheme’s R&D-intensive SME claims: 4,965 claims worth £855m between them.

Relief under the RDEC and merged RDEC schemes rose 29% to £5.9bn, while relief under the SME scheme and ERIS fell 29% to £2.3bn. HMRC attributes most of that shift to SMEs moving into the merged scheme and to the new rates applying for a full year, and it warns that SME-level figures for 2024-25 are not comparable with earlier years. The comparison that does hold is for large companies: their claims under RDEC and the merged scheme together rose 4%, and their qualifying expenditure rose 14% to £30.2bn. HMRC still compares some SME totals itself: SME claims fell 19%, and SMEs claimed on £20.7bn of R&D expenditure, 3% less than the previous year’s £21.3bn.

Three sectors — manufacturing, information and communication, and professional, scientific and technical — accounted for 75% of claims and 71% of support.

Support remains heavily concentrated in a handful of very large claims. The 560 claims worth more than £2m each are 1% of all claims and 49% of all support. At the other end, claims worth under £15,000 fell from 13,225 to 10,075, a drop of 24% against the 17% fall overall. They have not disappeared: they are still 25% of all claims. This year the top of the distribution moved too: relief carried by claims over £2m rose by £710m, more than the £405m rise in total relief. HMRC puts part of the rise in the share of relief going to claims worth £500,000 or more, from 62% to 69%, down to the increased 20% RDEC rate applying in full.

Did large companies receive more R&D relief than SMEs in 2024-25?

Yes. Counted by the size of the company rather than the scheme it claimed under, HMRC puts large companies’ relief in 2024-25 at £4.6bn and SMEs’ at £3.6bn. On LimestoneGrey’s calculation from HMRC’s tables, that makes 2024-25 the first year since 2015-16 in which large companies received more relief than SMEs; in 2015-16 they received £2,055m against SMEs’ £1,915m. Treat that comparison with care. HMRC gives no year-on-year change in relief by company size, and warns that its 2024-25 SME figures are not comparable with earlier years. The merged scheme’s rules on contracted-out R&D can also move relief between the two groups.

Two points sit behind those totals. The SME figure includes what SMEs claimed under RDEC and the merged scheme, not only under the SME scheme. And under the merged scheme, HMRC notes, whichever company is the decision-maker can claim for contracted-out R&D, in most cases the company contracting the work out. So relief for the same work can move from an SME carrying it out to a large company commissioning it.

Subject to those caveats, and on LimestoneGrey’s calculation, large companies’ relief rose about 24%, while their qualifying expenditure rose 14% to £30.2bn. On the same basis, the average large-company claim was about £1.21m, up 19% from about £1.02m. The average SME claim was about £98,000; given HMRC’s warning on SME figures, we give no change for it.

What to watch in the next release

Because 2024-25 mixes old-scheme and new-scheme claims, it cannot yet show how the claimant population divides between the merged scheme and ERIS. HMRC counts each claim in the year its accounting period ends, and an accounting period cannot run longer than 12 months, so every period ending in 2025-26 began on or after 1 April 2024. That makes 2025-26 the first year in which every claim falls under the merged scheme or ERIS.

Three things to look for:

• The first full year of the merged scheme and ERIS. How the claimant population divides on R&D intensity rather than company size, once the old schemes have dropped out of the figures.
• Whether smaller genuine claimants return. Claims worth under £15,000 fell again in 2024-25. That fall mixes companies that should never have claimed with companies that could have. Only a recovery in volumes without a rise in error and fraud would tell the two apart.
• Whether average claim value holds. The average rose again in 2024-25, driven this time by the largest claims and the full-year RDEC rate. The next release will show how much of the rise lasts once the rate change has worked through.

This series

HMRC publishes these statistics once a year, in the autumn, and plans its next release for Autumn 2027. Every release so far has covered the financial year that ended about eighteen months before publication, which points to 2025-26, though HMRC has not confirmed the coverage.

Everything on this page, and both download files, is built from the September 2026 release, with the national figures for 2000-01 to 2015-16 carried forward from the September 2025 release. When the Autumn 2027 figures land we rebuild the CSV and JSON from HMRC’s new tables and update this page on publication day. We intend to keep the download URLs stable across releases, so a bookmark or a scheduled fetch should keep working.

Last checked against the source tables on 29 September 2026. If you want to understand where your own company sits in the current system, start with which R&D scheme applies to you, check the rates for your period, or talk it through with a chartered adviser.

Sources

• R&D tax credits statistics, September 2026 — the release, its commentary and the spreadsheets below.
• Main tables (ODS), tables RD1, RD2 and RD4 to RD8 — claims, cost of support and qualifying expenditure by year and scheme (RD1, RD2, RD4), the regional analysis (RD5), the sector analysis (RD6), the claim size bands (RD7) and first-time applicants (RD8). HMRC has folded the R&D-intensive SME figures, previously table RD3, into the main tables.
• Supplementary tables (ODS), tables RDS1 to RDS3 — the ITL2 sub-regional analysis behind the Welsh figures, the region-by-sector analysis behind the Welsh sector mix, and the two-digit industry division analysis.
• R&D tax credits statistics, September 2025, main tables (archived copy; the gov.uk file has been withdrawn) — the source of the national figures for 2000-01 to 2015-16, which the 2026 tables no longer include. Its table RD2 gives the 2015-16 relief by scheme, from which the company-size split is calculated. It also holds the first estimates for 2023-24 that this page compares against, including the 1,440 Welsh claims (RD5_2324).
• HMRC’s approach to R&D tax reliefs 2023–24 — 17% of claims checked in 2023-24 and 500-plus compliance staff. Its 17.6% error-and-fraud estimate for 2021-22 stands; its 7.8% illustrative estimate for 2023-24 was superseded by the measured 6.4% below.
• HMRC annual report and accounts 2025–26 — error and fraud measured at 6.4% for 2023-24, with an illustrative 5.3% for the two years since.