Since the beginning of the pandemic, there have been three self-employed income support schemes (SEISS) introduced to support self-employed individuals. You will be pleased to know that two more grants will soon be made available, capped at £7,500 each. The online facility to claim the 4th SEISS grant will open in late April and the 5th in July 2021.
What Are The New SEISS Grants?
Both of the new SEISS grants will be based on your average trading profits reported on your tax returns for the four years leading up to 2019-2020. You will only be eligible for these grants if you submitted your 2019-2020 tax return before midnight on the 2nd March 2021. This was meant to be the 31st January 2021 but was extended.
The extension means that if you started your company in 2019-2020, you would now be able to claim your first SEISS grant, providing that you meet the other criteria and threshold. These are the exact same guidelines that were in place for the previous three grants.
In order to claim the 4th grant, you will be required to declare that you have suffered a significant drop in trading profits. Unfortunately, HMRC does not specify what is meant by ‘significant’. However, what we do know is that the reduction in a profit should not have been enough to put you out of business, so you must still be trading, or if COVID-19 restrictions are prohibiting this, are planning to continue after they have been lifted.
For the 5th grant, available in late July 2021, the eligibility criteria will be tighter. If your turnover has fallen by at least 30%, you may be able to receive the full grant, calculated at 80% of your average trading profits and capped at £7,500. For those who fall below the 30% threshold, a grant will be issued based on 30% of average profits, capped at £2,850.
It is important to note that all five of the SEISS grants are taxable income for your business, so you will have to declare them as income tax on your tax returns for the tax years in which they are received.