Being a registered charity does not let you claim Gift Aid. Being recognised by HMRC does not let you claim it either, not on its own.
There are three steps, and charities routinely stop after the first two: register with the Charity Commission if you need to, get recognised by HMRC as a charity for tax purposes, then add Charities Online to your HMRC account. Only after the third can money move.
The useful thing to know before any of that: you can claim up to four years back. Declarations you collect today, while you are still waiting, are not wasted.
If you are working through setup and this is one of several things still outstanding, our charity setup support covers the sequence.
Who can apply
Registered charities are the obvious case, but the door is wider than that.
An organisation established for charitable purposes only, run by people HMRC considers fit and proper, can seek recognition for tax purposes even where it is not registered with a charity regulator. That matters for smaller organisations in England and Wales sitting below the registration threshold.
Community amateur sports clubs are separate again. A CASC is a tax status granted by HMRC rather than a legal structure, and a club with that status can claim Gift Aid without being a charity at all. A community interest company cannot claim Gift Aid – a CIC is not a charity – unless it holds CASC status.
If your position is unclear, HMRC’s charities helpline will tell you before you spend an afternoon on a form.
Do the Commission first, if you need to
GOV.UK is explicit that you should check whether you need to register with the Charity Commission before you register with HMRC. The two are separate processes with separate regulators, and the order matters because HMRC asks for your regulator registration number if you have one.
The clocks are also very different. Charity Commission registration takes three to six months and sometimes longer. HMRC recognition is a shorter process. If you are running both, expect the Commission to be the constraint.
Our guide to Charity Commission registration covers that side.
What to have ready
HMRC asks for five things:
- Bank account details and financial accounts
- Details of your officials, including dates of birth and National Insurance numbers
- Your registration number, if you are registered with a regulator
- Your charitable objectives, sometimes called purposes
- Your governing document
Gathering the officials’ details takes longer than people expect, because it means going back to every trustee individually for information they may be reluctant to send by email. Start there rather than at the form.
The application itself is online, and you sign in to complete it. If you do not have sign-in details, you can create them as part of the process, and there is an eligibility check at the start. Applications can be saved and picked up again from a task list, so you do not have to finish in one sitting.
Once you are registered, changes to your details – new trustees, a different bank account – go to HMRC on form ChV1 rather than through a fresh application.
Setting up and not sure what order any of it goes in?
HMRC recognition, Commission registration, a bank account, a governing document and your first policies all interlock, and doing them in the wrong order costs months. A free Charity Consultation will get the sequence straight before you start.
Start collecting declarations now
This is the step almost nobody mentions, and it is worth more than anything else on this page.
Gift Aid can be claimed up to four years after the end of the accounting period in which the donation was received. So a charity that spends six months getting registered has not lost six months of Gift Aid – provided it collected valid declarations along the way.
That means putting a proper declaration in front of donors from your first day, not from the day HMRC writes back. The declaration has to carry the donor’s full name and home address, name your charity, identify which gifts it covers, and explain that the donor must have paid enough Income Tax or Capital Gains Tax to cover what will be reclaimed. Those requirements are set out in how Gift Aid works.
Get the wording right at the start and your first claim can cover everything since you began. Get it wrong, and you will be re-approaching donors to ask again, which is a conversation nobody enjoys.
Recognition is not the same as being able to claim
When HMRC confirms recognition, you receive a charity’s reference number. Keep it somewhere you will find it – it starts with letters or an X, and you will need it repeatedly.
Before you can submit anything, you also have to add Charities Online to your HMRC online account. This is a separate enrolment, and it is where charities who assumed recognition was the finish line get stuck.
Making the first claim
Claims go through Charities Online, and the mechanics are more particular than most online forms.
Donations are listed on an HMRC schedule spreadsheet, which you attach to the claim. Each spreadsheet holds up to 1,000 donations, and you can submit as many claims as you need – but only one at a time, and each has to be submitted before you start the next. Unfinished claims can be saved and returned to within 30 days.
The spreadsheet comes in two versions, one for Microsoft Excel and one for LibreOffice. Download the one matching your software and do not convert between them, and do not rename the file or change its extension, or it will not attach. Your software also needs to be set to English UK.
The fields have their own rules. Titles are limited to four characters and names to 35. Double-barrelled surnames take a space rather than a hyphen. Postcodes go in capitals with a space. Dates use DD/MM/YY, and where a donor has given several times you can enter the latest date in the series.
Two shortcuts save considerable time. Donations under £30 can be grouped as aggregated donations with a description instead of individual donor details, which suits collection envelopes. And sponsored events can go in under a single entry in the participant’s name, as long as no individual sponsorship exceeds £500 – so you are not typing in forty people who each gave £5.
If your donations run to any volume, claiming through compatible database software rather than the spreadsheet is worth looking at.
The Small Donations Scheme runs through the same service using its own schedules, and has a shorter two-year window. Its rules are in our piece on the Small Donations Scheme.
Keeping records afterwards
HMRC requires records to be kept for two years after the claim deadline. Since that deadline falls four years after the end of the accounting period, the practical effect is six years of retention from the period the donations relate to.
What you keep is the declaration, the donation record, and the connection between them, in whatever record-keeping system you use. A list of amounts with no declarations behind it will not withstand a check, and the errors that lead to repayment are consistent enough that we have written them up separately in five Gift Aid mistakes.
Set up the recording properly with your first claim. Retrofitting it across four years of donations is a job nobody has time for.
If setup has stalled somewhere between the governing document and the first claim, that is a defined piece of work – and a one-off setup project will finish it.
