Tick everything that applies. Nothing here is stored or sent anywhere — it all runs in your browser.
This is a signposting tool, not an application, and matching here doesn't mean you'll be awarded anything. Two honest caveats worth holding onto. First, grant funding is genuinely scarce: the large national competitions are heavily oversubscribed, and the great majority of UK small businesses will never receive a grant. The schemes with reliable odds are the unglamorous ones — a government-backed loan, a tax relief you qualify for on the rules, a few thousand pounds from a local Growth Hub. Second, schemes open and close constantly, particularly regional ones funded through the UK Shared Prosperity Fund, so treat anything below as a starting point to check rather than a current, open call. The definitive live list is the government's own finder at gov.uk/business-finance-support, which filters by region, sector and business size.
Be wary of anyone charging an upfront fee to "find you grants" or promising a high success rate. Legitimate grant writers are usually paid on results or work on a defined scope, and every scheme listed here can be applied for directly, free, by you.
"Business grants" is one of the most searched and least useful phrases in UK small business finance, because the results are dominated by directories listing schemes that closed years ago. The reality is narrower. There is no general-purpose grant for starting a business in the UK. What exists is a patchwork: government-backed loans like Start Up Loans, tax reliefs such as R&D relief and the venture capital schemes, competitive innovation grants from Innovate UK for genuinely novel technical work, and small local grants administered by Growth Hubs and councils, often funded through the UK Shared Prosperity Fund.
This quick-check sorts that patchwork by what your answers actually qualify you for, and orders the results by how realistic each one is rather than how large the headline figure looks. It covers England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, since business support is devolved and the delivery bodies differ in each. Figures are current as at July 2026 — including the Start Up Loans changes that took effect on 6 April 2026, raising the fixed rate to 7.5% and extending eligibility to businesses trading up to five years.
Not as a general scheme, no. The closest thing is the Start Up Loan — government-backed, but a loan you repay personally, not free money. Grants do exist, but they're targeted: at innovation, at particular regions, at specific sectors or age groups. If a website promises a straightforward "£10,000 government start-up grant" with no qualifying criteria, it's marketing rather than fact.
Usually yes. Most grants received for trading purposes count as taxable income for income tax or corporation tax, though a grant given specifically towards a capital asset is treated differently. There's also an interaction worth knowing about: if a project is grant-funded, you generally can't claim the full R&D tax relief on the same expenditure. Worth checking with an accountant before assuming the headline figure is what you keep.
Fitting the funder's stated objective rather than bending your project to fit the money. Assessors score against published criteria, so applications that answer those criteria directly, with specific evidence and realistic numbers, do far better than ambitious ones that don't. Match funding matters too — many schemes only cover a percentage of project costs, so you need the rest available and demonstrable before you apply.