The no’s built into the definition
The DSIT guidelines exclude more than most marketing admits. Grouped honestly:
- New to you, not to the field. An advance means overall knowledge or capability in the field. Implementing what competent professionals elsewhere can already do, buying it in, configuring it, deploying it well, is adoption, not R&D.
- Readily resolvable difficulty. Hard work whose answers a competent professional could readily reach is outside the definition in terms. Effort is not uncertainty.
- Non-technological goals. Commercial, financial, managerial and market problems are not science or technology, HMRC’s own example kills a market-analytics project on exactly that ground, and cosmetic and aesthetic improvements are excluded by the guidelines directly.
- The wrong window. Work before an uncertainty is identified, and everything after it is resolved, fine-tuning, rollout, scale-up, does not qualify even inside a genuinely qualifying project. HMRC’s example draws the line on day 12 of a 20-day programme.
- The wrong field. The guidelines require a field of science or technology; work in, say, social sciences or pure commerce does not become R&D by being analytical.
The no’s built into the company rules
Even with qualifying work, the claim fails where the claimant does:
- unincorporated businesses outside Corporation Tax
- companies not meeting the going-concern condition, or in administration or liquidation
- contracted-out work where the decision to undertake the R&D, and therefore the claim, belongs to your customer
- and, for the enhanced route specifically, the ERIS gates Those all live on who qualifies.
The sectors HMRC has named
HMRC’s published compliance approach describes education campaigns targeted at sectors where R&D is unlikely to be carried out: care homes, childcare providers, personal trainers, wholesalers and retailers, pubs and restaurants. HMRC says companies in these sectors are at risk of being approached by agents offering speculative claims. Two things are true at once: the list is probabilistic, not a ban, and a claim from within it starts under a spotlight. If you are in one of these sectors and were promised a routine claim, treat that promise as the red flag.
What “no” is worth
A clear no, early, saves you four times over. It saves the fee you would have paid, the enquiry that follows optimistic claims, the penalties that follow careless ones, and the officer’s signature on a declaration that should never have been made. It also leaves something behind: an honest map of where your work sits relative to the qualifying line, which is exactly what tells you when a future project crosses it.
That is the deal we offer in plain terms: if the answer is no, we say so at the outset, without a fee, and you have lost one conversation. If the answer is genuinely arguable, we say that too, with the risks priced. The one thing we will not do is find R&D that is not there.
Frequently asked questions
An adviser told us everyone in our industry claims. Are they right?
No industry qualifies as an industry. The test is project by project: an advance in science or technology through genuine uncertainty. "Everyone claims" was the sales line behind much of the error HMRC has been unwinding, and it is the single fastest reason to change adviser.
Our work is genuinely hard and innovative to us. Why might it still not qualify?
Because the advance must be to the field's knowledge or capability, not yours. Difficult adoption of existing technology, however transformative for your business, is catching up, and the guidelines say so directly.
We are in one of HMRC's "unlikely" sectors but believe we have real R&D. Can we claim?
The list is about probability, not prohibition; HMRC's wording is "unlikely to be carried out", not "cannot". A genuine advance claimed from an unlikely sector needs its evidence in unusually good order, and honestly, it will be looked at. If the case is real, that is survivable.
If we do not qualify now, is that permanent?
No. Qualification is period-by-period and project-by-project. Companies cross the line when their work moves from applying known technology to pushing past it, and the record-keeping habits that support a future claim are worth starting before the R&D does.