SEIS and EIS, from advance assurance to the certificates in your investors’ hands.

It is HMRC confirming, before you raise, that a proposed share issue looks like it will qualify for the scheme. Legally you can raise without it. Practically most angels will not wire money without it, because their relief depends on your company qualifying and they have no way of checking that themselves. It is the first thing we do.

SEIS is capped at £250,000 over the company's lifetime, with gross assets of no more than £350,000 at the point shares are issued, fewer than 25 full-time equivalent employees, and a qualifying trade carried on for no more than three years. EIS runs to £10 million in any 12 months and £24 million over the company's lifetime, with gross assets of no more than £30 million before the issue and £35 million immediately after, fewer than 250 employees, and within seven years of first commercial sale. The EIS limits doubled on 6 April 2026.

Not to all of them. A Northern Ireland company trading in goods, or in the generation, transmission, distribution, supply, wholesale or cross-border exchange of electricity, is a “specified company” and keeps the old limits: £5 million a year, £12 million lifetime, and gross assets of £15 million before and £16 million after. If you manufacture in Northern Ireland this is the single most important sentence on this page, and it is one a lot of advisers have not caught up with.

Enormously, and it is where rounds go wrong irreversibly. SEIS shares must be issued before EIS shares. Issue them on the same day and the SEIS shares do not qualify, which means your earliest investors lose 50% relief they were promised. Unwinding it afterwards is not a phone call to HMRC; it is a court application. We sequence the issue before anyone signs anything.

Most often the risk-to-capital condition, which asks whether the company genuinely intends to grow and develop its trade long term and whether the investor is genuinely at risk of losing more than they get back in relief. Structures that look asset-backed, income-secured or built around a pre-planned exit fail it. After that: an excluded activity forming a substantial part of the trade, applications that name no actual prospective investors, and failing to disclose an intermediary, which invalidates any assurance given.

HMRC's internal aim is most applications within 15 working days and complex ones within 40, but in practice six to eight weeks is common and the approval rate has been falling — provisional 2025-26 figures show 76% of SEIS and 72% of EIS applications approved, down from 85% and 76% the year before. Build the time into your raise rather than discovering it mid-round.

The part most founders have not budgeted attention for. You file a compliance statement with HMRC, and once it is authorised you issue each investor their certificate — which is the document they actually need to claim their relief. Until that lands, your investors have paid for a tax relief they cannot yet claim, and they will chase you for it. We run this end to end so it does not become your problem three months after close.