R&D Tax Credits in Surrey: What Tech and Creative Firms Are Still Getting Wrong in 2026

By Surrey Accountants Team — 2026-06-11 — Tax Guides

If you run a tech or creative business in Surrey and you haven't looked at your R&D tax position in the last twelve months, you're almost certainly working off old information. The rules changed in April 2024, they changed again in April 2025, and HMRC's enquiry rate on R&D claims is the highest I've seen in fifteen years of doing this. Half the founders I sit down with in Guildford and Woking are either claiming for things they shouldn't, or — more often — not claiming for work that genuinely qualifies because someone told them in 2022 that they weren't eligibl

So here's the lay of the land, written for the kind of business I actually see around Surrey: the 8-to-40 person software house, the post-production studio off the A3, the agency in Farnham that's quietly built its own client portal, the hardware startup renting a corner of a co-working space in Woking.

The merged scheme, in plain English

For accounting periods starting on or after 1 April 2024, the old SME and RDEC schemes were folded into a single "merged" R&D scheme. The headline rate is a 20% above-the-line credit, which works out to roughly 15p back in the pound after corporation tax for most profitable companies. That's less generous than the old SME scheme was at its peak (when it briefly hit around 33p in the pound), and that drop is the thing most founders flinch at when I explain it.

There's a separate, more generous route — Enhanced R&D Intensive Support, or ERIS — for loss-making SMEs whose qualifying R&D spend is at least 30% of total expenditure. Genuine early-stage software and biotech startups often qualify. Agencies and studios with a side project usually don't, no matter how much we'd like them to.

The practical upshot: if your last claim was prepared by a firm that hasn't said the words "merged scheme" to you, get a second opinion. I mean that gently. I've seen claims filed in 2025 still using the pre-merger framing, which is a fast way to attract an enquiry.

What actually counts as R&D in 2026

HMRC's definition hasn't really moved — it's still about resolving "scientific or technological uncertainty" that a competent professional in the field couldn't have easily worked out. What's moved is HMRC's appetite for pushing back.