Benefits and statutory pay
HMRC has paid £300m in Help to Save bonuses. The bar is £1.
HMRC said on 21 September that Help to Save has paid out more than £300 million; the earnings test to get in is £1 of take-home pay.
£1 Take-home pay needed to qualify
HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) said on 21 September that Help to Save has now paid out more than £300 million in bonuses, across 656,700 accounts opened since the scheme launched in September 2018. The bar to get in is lower than almost anyone assumes: you need to be getting Universal Credit and to have had take-home pay of £1 or more in your last monthly assessment period. That is the whole test.
If that is you, there is a fork in front of you: pay in up to £50 a month for four years, pay in less, or leave it alone. At most, that choice is worth £1,200 of government money.
Who can open one
Take-home pay means pay after deductions such as tax and National Insurance. There is no minimum number of hours.
The old rule was earnings worth 16 hours a week at the National Living Wage. It was dropped on 6 April 2025 and replaced with the £1 test, which brought roughly 550,000 more people in. If you looked at Help to Save before then and were turned away, the reason may no longer exist.
The account closes four years after you open it, and you keep the money in it.
What each pattern pays
You can pay in between £1 and £50 in any calendar month, and you can skip months. The government adds 50p for every £1 — but not monthly. It pays two bonuses, one at the end of year two and one at the end of year four, and both go into your own bank account rather than back into the Help to Save account.
Four patterns, on round figures. Someone saving £10 a month earns at the same rate as someone saving the full £50.
| Pattern | You pay in | Government bonus |
|---|---|---|
| £50 every month for four years | £2,400 | £1,200 |
| £10 every month for four years | £480 | £240 |
| £50 a month for two years, then stop | £1,200 | £600 |
| £50 a month, but empty the account at year two | £2,400 | £600 |
The highest-balance rule cuts both ways
The first bonus is half of the highest balance your account reached in the first two years — not the balance on the day it is worked out. So if you build up £1,200 and then take it all out to cover a boiler repair, the £600 you earned is still yours. That half of the rule is generous, and almost nobody knows it.
The second bonus is different. It is half the difference between your highest balance in years three and four and your highest balance in years one and two. If the later figure is not higher, there is no final bonus at all.
That is where emptying the account bites. Once £1,200 has gone out, £50 a month for the remaining 24 months puts £1,200 back — and £1,200 is not more than £1,200. The final bonus is nil. The withdrawal never touched the first bonus. It cost the entire second one, £600.
What it does to your Universal Credit
Nothing, at these sums. Savings of £6,000 or less do not affect Universal Credit or Housing Benefit, and the most a Help to Save account can ever hold is £2,400. The bonuses themselves do not affect Universal Credit either.
What the answer turns on
Whether you can leave the money where it is for four years, because the final bonus depends entirely on the balance going up rather than sideways. Whether the £50 a month would otherwise be going against a debt. And whether you already hold savings elsewhere that take you past the £6,000 line.
One thing has changed in the scheme’s favour: it is no longer on a deadline. Help to Save had been extended only to April 2027, but the Budget of 26 November 2025 made it permanent. And from April 2028, eligibility extends to Universal Credit claimants receiving the child or caring element of their award, whether or not they are earning — about 1.5 million more households.
The eligibility test is on take-home pay, not gross pay, and people routinely check the wrong one. Our NHS pay calculator sets the deductions out line by line. How we check every figure is on methodology, and the documents behind this story are listed on sources.
Where these figures come from
- More than £300 million paid out through Help to Save with thousands more savers set to benefit — GOV.UK (HM Revenue and Customs)
- Help to Save: Eligibility — GOV.UK
- Help to Save: How it will affect your benefits — GOV.UK
- Help to Save accounts: amendment to the Universal Credit eligibility criteria — GOV.UK (HM Treasury)
Every figure traces to a dated document — the line this section is named after. If one here is wrong, tell us and it gets fixed publicly. Work out your own figures.