Self-Employed Income Support Scheme (SEISS)

There have been two rounds of grant support for the self-employed (SEISS-1  and SEISS-2) and the Chancellor has announced there will be two further SEISS grants, covering the six months from November 2020 to April 2021.

The third grant (SEISS-3) will be calculated at 80% of your average monthly profits, based on the same profit figures as were used to calculate the SEISS-1 and SEISS-2 grants. These were derived from your self-employed profits as reported on your tax returns for 2016/17 to 2018/19, or the portion of that period when you were self-employed.

You will qualify for the SEISS-3 grant if all of the following apply:

• you were eligible for the previous SEISS grants (even if you didn’t apply for them); and either
• you are currently actively trading, but are impacted by reduced demand due to coronavirus; or
• you were previously trading but are temporarily unable to do so due to coronavirus.

Applications will open on 30 November 2020 for the SEISS-3 grant and it will be capped at £7,500 for three months, working out at £2,500 per month.

A fourth grant (SEISS-4) will be payable for three months to help you survive from February to April 2021. We don’t know how much that grant will be or what the cap will be. The qualifying conditions for the SEISS-4 grant are likely to be similar to those for the SEISS-3 grant.

The profits used as the basis for the SEISS-4 grant will also be your average annual profits derived from your tax returns for 2016/17 to 2018/19, although by the time applications open in February 2021 your tax return for 2019/20 will have been submitted (deadline is 31 January 2021).