Qualifying Care Relief: The 2026/27, 2025/26 and 2024/25 Amounts, and How the Sum Works

If you foster, provide shared lives care or take a kinship placement, your care income is taxed under qualifying care relief, and the amount you can receive before any tax arises is worked out from a fixed amount plus a weekly amount for each person you care for. The amounts change with CPI each year, so the first thing to settle is which tax year's return you are filling in.

What are the qualifying care relief amounts for 2026/27, 2025/26 and 2024/25?

Part of the qualifying amount	2026/27	2025/26	2024/25
Fixed amount, per household, per tax year	£20,440	£19,690	£19,360
Weekly amount, each child under 11	£435	£415	£405
Weekly amount, each child aged 11 or over	£515	£495	£485
Weekly amount, each adult cared for	£515	£495	£485

On the adult row for 2026/27: gov.uk does not publish a separate adult figure for 2026/27; the adult amount has always matched the 11-or-over amount, and £515 is stated on that basis. Confirm with your Shared Lives scheme before you rely on it.

The 2026/27 column is the set published in the gov.uk tax guidance for foster parents, which carries the current year's amounts. The 2025/26 column is the set carried in HMRC helpsheet HS236 in its 2026 edition, and 2024/25 is the edition before it. Use the column that matches the tax year of the return in front of you, and never blend two columns inside one calculation.

Which tax year's figures apply to the return you are filing?

The tax year runs from 6 April to 5 April. The return due online by 31 January 2027 covers the year that ended on 5 April 2026, which is 2025/26, so it uses the £19,690, £415 and £495 amounts. The year running now, to 5 April 2027, is 2026/27 and uses £20,440, £435 and £515. That return is filed online by 31 January 2028. A 2024/25 return, already past its deadline, uses £19,360, £405 and £485.

Working out a 2024/25 qualifying amount uses exactly the same shape as the current year with the older numbers. A carer with one child aged 9 placed for all 52 weeks of 2024/25 has a qualifying amount of £19,360 plus 52 weeks at £405, which is £19,360 plus £21,060, giving £40,420.

What is qualifying care relief?

Qualifying care relief is a statutory relief in Part 7 Chapter 2 of the Income Tax (Trading and Other Income) Act 2005. It gives you a qualifying amount, calculated from your own placements, and measures your care receipts against it. If your receipts for the year are at or below your qualifying amount, your taxable profit from the care is nil. If they are above it, only the excess is in charge, unless you choose to be taxed on your actual profit instead.

You are self-employed for these purposes, so the care sits on the self-employment pages of your self assessment return. Class 2 National Insurance is no longer a charge for the self-employed from 6 April 2024, and profits at or above the small profits threshold are treated as paid for state-pension purposes. If your care leaves you with nil profit and you have no other self-employment, ask HMRC about paying voluntary contributions before you assume your record is covered.

Who and what does qualifying care relief cover?

The relief is wider than fostering, and this is the part most pages miss. It covers foster care, shared lives care, kinship and friends-and-family placements, staying put arrangements where a young person remains with you past 18, and parent-and-child placements. What matters is that the placement is made by a local authority, a Health and Social Care Trust, a fostering service provider or a Shared Lives scheme.

Shared lives and adult placement carers use the adult weekly amount, which was £495 a week for 2025/26 and is taken as £515 for 2026/27 on the basis set out under the table above. The fixed amount is per household for the tax year, not per person cared for, so it is counted once however many placements you have.

How do you work out your qualifying amount?

Three steps, in this order, all inside one tax year.

1. Start with the fixed amount for the year: £20,440 for 2026/27, or £19,690 for 2025/26.
2. For each person you cared for, multiply the weekly amount for their age band by the number of weeks they were placed with you in that tax year. A part week counts as a week.
3. Add the weekly totals to the fixed amount. That total is your qualifying amount.

Then compare your total care receipts for the year against it. Receipts means everything you received for the care from the placing authority or agency, including any additional payments and allowances made to you for the placement.

How much can a foster carer earn before paying tax?

There is no single national figure, because the answer is your own qualifying amount. Take Petra, a foster carer in Bangor, in 2026/27, with one child aged 9 placed with her for all 52 weeks. Her qualifying amount is:

£20,440 fixed, plus 52 weeks at £435 per week, which is £22,620. Total qualifying amount for 2026/27: £43,060.

That one placement brought in £39,000 across the year. On its own that is below £43,060, so it produces no taxable profit and no income tax or Class 4 National Insurance. The receipts are not tax-free in the abstract, they are covered by that specific sum, and if the same single placement had brought in £45,000, the £1,940 above her qualifying amount would be taxable. Note that a second placement raises the qualifying amount as well as the receipts, so more children does not automatically mean more tax. The section below picks Petra's year up again and shows what happens when a second placement takes her past the qualifying amount.

Simplified method or profit method: how does the choice work?

Once your receipts pass your qualifying amount you elect, for that tax year, between two ways of being taxed.

• The simplified method. Taxable profit is total care receipts minus the qualifying amount. You do not need expense records for the care, because the qualifying amount stands in for them.
• The profit method. Taxable profit is total care receipts minus your actual allowable expenses and capital allowances, computed like any other trade.

The election is made year by year. You are not locked into whichever one you used last time, and the right answer can flip as your placements change. HS236 is the helpsheet that sets out the election and the boxes to use.

What happens when your receipts are above the qualifying amount?

Stay with Petra in Bangor, still in 2026/27. She kept the child aged 9 for all 52 weeks and took a second placement, a child aged 14, for 40 weeks. That takes her care receipts for the year from the £39,000 for the first placement to £71,000 in total, and her actual costs attributable to the care came to £14,500.

Qualifying amount for 2026/27:

• Fixed amount: £20,440
• Child aged 9, under 11, 52 weeks at £435: £22,620
• Child aged 14, 11 or over, 40 weeks at £515: £20,600
• Qualifying amount: £20,440 + £22,620 + £20,600 = £63,660

Simplified method: £71,000 receipts minus £63,660 qualifying amount = £7,340 taxable profit.

Profit method: £71,000 receipts minus £14,500 actual expenses = £56,500 taxable profit.

The simplified method is lower by £49,160, so that is the one Petra elects for 2026/27. On £7,340 of profit, with no other income, she is below the £12,570 personal allowance and below the £12,570 Class 4 starting point, both still current when this page was checked in August 2026, so the tax due on the care is nil even though her profit is not.

The point at which the answer flips is easy to state: the two methods give the same figure when your actual allowable expenses equal your qualifying amount. Below that, the simplified method wins. Above it, the profit method wins. For Petra in 2026/27 her expenses would have had to exceed £63,660 before the profit method was worth electing, which is why the simplified method is the usual outcome. The profit method earns its place in years with heavy capital spending, a large adaptation to the home, or very few weeks of placement against a full year of costs.

Do you still need to file a tax return if you owe nothing?

Very often, yes. Nil taxable profit is not the same as no filing obligation. If HMRC has issued you a notice to file, the return is due whatever the figures say. You will also need to file if you have other untaxed income, and filing is how the relief and your self-employment are recorded in the first place. Missing the online deadline of 31 January triggers an automatic £100 penalty even where nothing is owed.

On the return you report the care receipts and the qualifying amount rather than leaving the pages blank. If you want the return handled for you alongside the rest of your position, our page on accounting for foster carers covers what that involves, and our self assessment page sets out the deadlines and penalties in full.

Why do published qualifying care relief figures differ so much?

Because the amounts are uprated by the Consumer Prices Index each tax year, and because the two main sources refresh at different times. The gov.uk foster-parent tax guidance carries the current amounts but states them without a tax-year label, while the HS236 helpsheet is published per year and lags the guidance. A figure copied from either source without noting the year it belonged to goes stale the following April and looks authoritative while it does so.

Two practical consequences. First, check the year attached to any qualifying care relief amount before you use it, including the ones on this page, which are stated for 2026/27, 2025/26 and 2024/25 and were checked in August 2026. Second, if you have been filing on figures that were too low, earlier years can normally be corrected: amendments are open for a period after the filing deadline, and beyond that an overpayment relief claim is the route. Worth checking if your receipts were anywhere near the threshold.

What records should you keep?

Under the simplified method you still need the receipts side documented, plus enough placement detail to rebuild the weekly arithmetic: who was placed with you, their age band, and the start and end dates. Keep the placement letters and the remittance statements from the authority or agency. If you might elect the profit method in any year, you need the expense and capital records for that year as well, which is a reason to keep them even in years the simplified method wins.

Making Tax Digital for Income Tax phases in from April 2026 by qualifying income, which is measured on gross income rather than profit. How care receipts under qualifying care relief are counted for that test is not something to assume from your nil profit figure: check it against HMRC's current MTD guidance, or ask us, before deciding you are outside the timetable. Our page on MTD record keeping for sole traders sets out what changes.