This guidance note provides an overview of the rules relating to the apportionment retail schemes. This note should be read in conjunction with the Retail schemes — overview and Retail schemes — specific industries guidance notes.

A business making retail sales can use a retail scheme if they cannot use the normal accounting rules and their VAT exclusive turnover does not exceed £130m a year.

The retail scheme used by the business must produce a fair and reasonable result and the business must be able to identify the tax exclusive value of the sale, the applicable VAT rate and be able to produce periodic totals of those amounts.