Every May, HMRC publishes the closest thing UK venture has to a source of truth on the tax-advantaged schemes: not rounds announced or intended, but money actually filed and claimed. This year's release, covering the tax year to April 2025, reads at first glance like a non-event: EIS companies raised £1,575m, all but identical to the year before. But read properly, it reveals a market quietly rearranging itself, and the direction of travel matters more than the flat headline.
The £1,575m raised by 3,735 EIS companies is not simply flat on 2023–24. It now sits below where EIS stood before the pandemic (£1,894m in 2019–20) and well short of the £2,300m peak of 2021–22. HMRC puts the softness down to a sustained stretch of higher interest rates and a natural cooling after that record year, the same forces working through the wider UK venture market.
What the flat top line hides is a thinning underneath it. EIS subscriptions fell for a third year running to 169,190, the fewest since 2016–17, and the number of investors claiming income tax relief dropped 7% to 33,220. Fewer investors committing a similar total means the average cheque is getting larger. That shows up at the top of the range, where 4% of companies (those raising over £2m) took 27% of all EIS capital. Knowledge-intensive companies, the research-heavy businesses the scheme increasingly steers towards, drew £494m across a record 525 companies.
Where EIS flattened, SEIS accelerated. A record £276m went into 2,430 companies on a record 57,780 subscriptions, the clearest sign yet that the April 2023 expansion is working as intended. (That reform raised the amount a company can take under SEIS from £150,000 to £250,000, and increased the annual investor limit from £100,000 to £200,000.) HMRC is unusually direct about the knock-on effect: with more generous relief and higher limits, some capital that would once have gone into EIS is now being pointed at SEIS instead. 63% of SEIS money now sits above the old cap.
Put simply, the incentive did its job. The money is moving earlier, towards younger and smaller companies, at the stage where the relief is most generous and the need most acute.
EIS funding has rolled over to £1,575m while SEIS has climbed to a record £276m. Source: HMRC EIS/SEIS statistics, May 2026.
The flat EIS headline hides the real story: UK risk capital is moving earlier, smaller, and slightly further from London.
That last shift is geographic, too. London's share of EIS money has slipped from 51% to 45% in two years (on HMRC's preferred London-and-South-East cut, from 65% to 60%). It is gradual erosion rather than collapse, but the East of England's rebound to £158m suggests the map is broadening, if slowly.
As a manager of both EIS and SEIS funds, we have an obvious interest in these schemes looking healthy, so I will point to HMRC's figures rather than our own. But our own reading of the market (built from every share-allotment filing lodged at Companies House, a calendar-quarter view of the whole sub-£50m market rather than the tax-relief slice) points the same way: a softer top line, activity concentrating at the top, and average deal sizes drifting down. Two datasets, measuring different things, telling a consistent story.
The most forward-looking figure in the release is advance assurance, the pre-clearance companies seek before they raise. For 2025–26, SEIS advance-assurance applications jumped 24% to a record 4,085, while EIS applications rose just 4%. The front of the funnel is where next year's fundraising is settled, and right now it is filling up far faster on the SEIS side.
I do not expect EIS to keep sliding (the pipeline is stable and the knowledge-intensive incentives are still drawing capital in), but I do expect the gap to widen before it narrows. For anyone deciding where to deploy this tax year, the release makes the case for holding both: EIS for scale and later-stage exposure, SEIS for the earlier-stage end that is, on every measure here, where the momentum now sits.
A note on the numbers: HMRC's 2024–25 figures are provisional and will be revised upward as late compliance statements arrive, so today's flat EIS reading may firm up modestly with time.
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