Gift Aid Small Donations Scheme: Rules and How to Claim

The Gift Aid Small Donations Scheme lets charities and Community Amateur Sports Clubs claim a 25% top-up from HMRC on small cash and contactless donations of £30 or less, without needing a Gift Aid declaration from the donor. You can claim on up to £8,000 of qualifying donations per tax year, worth a maximum £2,000 in top-up payments.¹ The scheme was designed for collections where identifying every giver is impractical: bucket collections, church plates, street fundraising, and similar situations.

What Counts as a Small Donation

Three payment types qualify: cash (coins or notes in any currency, collected and banked in the UK), contactless card payments, and chip-and-PIN card transactions.² Cheques, bank transfers, and online donations do not qualify, whatever the amount.

Each donation must be £30 or less. You cannot split a larger gift to fit under the threshold. If someone drops £50 in cash into a bucket, none of that £50 qualifies for GASDS; you would need a full Gift Aid declaration to claim relief on it through standard Gift Aid instead.¹

Membership fees and subscriptions are excluded even when paid in cash and under £30.³ The scheme is aimed at spontaneous, voluntary gifts, not payments tied to a benefit or ongoing commitment. Cash placed in numbered envelopes by regular givers can still qualify, so long as each envelope contains £30 or less and you do not already hold a Gift Aid declaration from that donor.

Who Can Claim

Since 6 April 2017 the eligibility rules have been straightforward. A charity or CASC qualifies for GASDS if it has made a successful Gift Aid claim in the same tax year as its small donations claim.² In practice your organisation must be running at least some standard Gift Aid claims alongside GASDS. The older requirements for two years of registration and a multi-year Gift Aid history were removed.

The main disqualifier is a penalty. If HMRC charges your charity or CASC a penalty in relation to a Gift Aid or GASDS claim, you lose access to GASDS for two tax years. A penalty relating to 2023 to 2024, for example, blocks GASDS claims until 2025 to 2026. Penalties that are suspended or overturned on appeal do not count.²

How Much You Can Claim

The top-up rate is 25%, matching the basic rate of income tax at 20%.⁴ The overall cap is £8,000 of small donations per tax year, producing up to £2,000 in top-up payments.¹

Most organisations will not reach that ceiling because of the matching rule. Your GASDS claim cannot exceed ten times the Gift Aid donations you receive in the same tax year. Collect £100 in Gift Aid donations, and you can only claim GASDS on £1,000 of small donations. To use the full £8,000 allowance you need at least £800 of Gift Aid donations in the year, and both claims must relate to that same tax year.¹

This is where smaller charities get caught. If almost all your income arrives as anonymous cash with very few Gift Aid declarations, the matching rule will cut your claim sharply. Collecting declarations from even a handful of regular supporters directly raises your GASDS ceiling.

Extra Allowances for Community Buildings

Charities running activities in community buildings can claim on more than the standard £8,000. Each qualifying building carries its own separate allowance, so a charity operating from three eligible buildings could potentially claim on up to £8,000 per building in addition to the standard allowance.¹

A building qualifies only if the charity’s activities there meet all four conditions:

At least 10 people benefit from the charitable activity at the same time (they do not have to be the same 10 each session).
The activities take place in the building on at least 6 occasions per tax year.
The activities are open to the general public or a section of the public.
You do not charge people to enter the part of the building where the activity happens.

The charity does not have to own the building. A building used mainly for residential purposes or for selling goods will not qualify unless the charity uses a distinct part of it exclusively for charitable activities. Ten people helped one-to-one in separate rooms does not count; the activity must be a genuine group event.

Connected Charities

Where charities or CASCs are legally connected, the GASDS limits are shared rather than duplicated. If none of the connected organisations operates from a community building, they share a single £8,000 allowance between them. Connected charities that do run community buildings have a choice: claim under the community buildings rules individually, or agree to share one £8,000 limit across the group. The shared-limit option requires all connected charities to write to HMRC.³

Records You Need to Keep

HMRC does not want individual donor details for GASDS (that is the point of the scheme), but you must keep clear records of the collections themselves. For each collection, note the date, the payment method (cash, contactless, or chip-and-PIN), the total collected in each category, and, if the collection took place in a community building, the name and address of that building.

For contactless and chip-and-PIN donations, keep the records produced by the card terminal as your evidence.¹ Retain all records relating to small donations for six years from the end of the tax year they relate to.⁵ Keep GASDS-eligible donations separate from standard Gift Aid donations in your records, and track community building collections separately from general collections if you plan to use that allowance.

How to Submit a Claim

Claims go through Charities Online, accessed via your HMRC Government Gateway account. Sign in, go to the services page, choose to make a charity repayment claim, and you will find the section for GASDS top-up payments.⁶ Compatible commercial accounting software that connects to HMRC’s systems is also an option.

You must submit a GASDS claim within two years of the end of the tax year in which the donations were collected.¹ Miss that deadline and the top-up for that year’s collections is lost, so build the claim into your annual financial calendar.

HMRC usually processes claims within 20 working days, paying the top-up directly into the bank account registered to your charity or CASC.⁷ Check the amount received against the figures you submitted.

If HMRC Audits Your Claim

HMRC selects charities for audit either on a risk basis or at random, and being selected does not mean HMRC suspects a problem.⁸ The process usually opens with a questionnaire, and the auditor will tell you which records they need and whether the review can be handled by correspondence or needs a visit.

Auditors look for a clear trail linking each claim to the underlying donations and bank records. For GASDS they want collection totals, terminal receipts, and banking records to add up consistently. For any Gift Aid claims running alongside, they check that declarations exist and match individual donations. Assigning unidentified cash to donors who happen to have Gift Aid declarations is not acceptable and will be flagged.⁸

If errors turn up, you get at least 30 days to resolve them, such as tracking down missing declarations. HMRC applies a tolerance: charities claiming under £2,500 in Gift Aid per tax year with an error rate of 4% or less do not face tax recovery. For first-time or minor issues, HMRC may use an informal warning where the charity agrees to improve its processes instead of facing an immediate penalty.⁸ If the promised improvements are not made, HMRC will go back and recover tax for earlier years still within the statutory window.

1
GOV.UK. Claiming a Top-Up Payment on Small Charitable Donations
2
GOV.UK. Chapter 8: The Gift Aid Small Donations Scheme From 6 April 2017
3
GOV.UK. Claiming Gift Aid as a Charity or CASC – Small Donations Scheme
4
GOV.UK. Income Tax Rates and Personal Allowances
5
GOV.UK. Claiming Gift Aid as a Charity or CASC – Gift Aid Declarations
6
GOV.UK. Claim Tax Back on Donations Using Charities Online
7
GOV.UK. Claim Tax Back on Donations Using Charities Online – Section: Receiving Payment
8
GOV.UK. Chapter 7: Audits by HMRC Charities