R&D Tax Credits

Why Research and Development Specialists for your claim?

We are an R&D specialists with offices based in Manchester, Birmingham and Nottingham, offering a personal service that focuses solely on helping companies, like yours, identify, quantify, and successfully claim their R&D costs back from HMRC.

The 1000+ companies and 250+ accountants we work with cover many different sectors, including Construction, Manufacturing, Engineering, Food & Drink, IT & Software, Professional, Scientific and Technical.

We purely work on a success only basis and not only quantify and calculate a claim's value, but also document it in a summary report, to justify the claim to HMRC. 99% of our claims have never incurred a question from HMRC, and should a question arise, part of our process is to answer these on behalf of the client, without you incurring additional costs.

What are R&D Tax Credits?

The Research and Development tax relief scheme was introduced in 2000 by HMRC to support UK companies that work on innovative projects in science and technology and provides a potential cash refund or credit against corporation tax. The team at RDS will work with you to establish whether your business is eligible for R&D relief on a no win no fee basis.

Does my company qualify for R&D tax credits?

Any UK business could potentially qualify for R&D tax relief, regardless of market sector or industry. The RDS team will quickly determine if any area of your business is eligible.

In order to qualify as an SME for R&D tax relief, your company (along with any other linked companies) must employ fewer than 500 people with a turnover of under €100m or a balance sheet under €86m. SME tax relief allows the business to deduct an extra 130% of their qualifying costs from its yearly profit and the tax relief is normally obtained via corporation tax reduction with a benefit of 24.7% of qualifying R&D spend. There is a payable tax credit, with a receivable benefit of up to 33.3% of qualifying R&D spend, for loss making companies. Depending on your business’s tax position, there may be more tax efficient options available which the team will explain to you before submitting the claim.

Businesses that are above the SME limits are eligible to apply for relief through the RDEC scheme. This works differently to the SME scheme, with a claimant company potentially receiving a net benefit of up to 10.5% of its qualifying R&D spend.

The RDEC scheme is also available to SME companies to claim for projects that have already received funding. R&D tax relief can be claimed retrospectively, for up to two years after the end of the accounting period via an amendment to a corporation tax return. The RDS team will review the two accounting periods to assess whether R&D activity took place.