EIS relief

FORTHCOMING CHANGE: call for evidence on tax support for entrepreneurs: At Budget 2025, the government published a call for evidence on the impact of existing tax incentive schemes and options to provide further support for entrepreneurs. The call for evidence, which closed on 28 February 2026, seeks to understand the effectiveness of the current EIS and VCT schemes, to explore potential new ways to support scaling companies that have reached the VCT and EIS limits and to gather evidence about how tax policies might seek to encourage different types of investors.

The Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) offers substantial tax incentives to individual investors in smaller, higher-risk companies. This overview summarises the tax reliefs that are available and explains when EIS applies, ie what EIS conditions have to be met by the company, the investors, the shares, the use of funds and the arrangements as a whole in order for EIS reliefs to be available.