CIS, the VAT reverse charge, gross payment status, Making Tax Digital and payroll for Edinburgh trade businesses. We only act for trades, and we work with you remotely.
Read this first. Two of the regimes most often described as UK-wide are not. The Building Safety Levy is imposed by an England statutory instrument (SI 2025/1236) and does not apply to a site in Edinburgh. The dutyholder and competence duties come from The Building Regulations etc. (Amendment) (England) Regulations 2023, SI 2023/911, and do not extend here either. Your CIS and VAT position, by contrast, is identical to an English trade's — and the income tax on your profit is scottish rates and bands on non-savings income.
Two things make a Scottish trade business genuinely different, and neither of them is CIS.
The first is income tax. Scotland sets its own rates and bands on non-savings income, which is what a sole trader's or partner's trading profit is. Every income tax figure on the rest of this site — the 20%, 40% and 45% rates, the £50,270 higher rate threshold — is for England, Wales and Northern Ireland. They are not the figures that apply to a profit earned in Edinburgh. We do not publish the current Scottish bands here, because publishing a figure we have not verified against the Scottish Government's own rates for the year would be worse than publishing none. What we do is compute your liability on the Scottish rates for the year in question, which is a different calculation from the one an English trade gets.
What is not devolved is worth stating just as clearly, because it is where assumptions go wrong in the other direction. National Insurance is reserved — Class 4 at 6% between £12,570 and £50,270 then 2% above, Class 2 treated as paid at or above the £7,105 Small Profits Threshold, employer Class 1 at 15% above £5,000, and the £10,500 Employment Allowance all apply unchanged. So does corporation tax at 25% and 19% with marginal relief between £50,000 and £250,000, and so does the £500 dividend allowance with the 10.75% and 35.75% rates from 6 April 2026.
The second difference is building safety. The Building Safety Levy is England only — SI 2025/1236 is an England instrument and does not apply to a Scottish site. So is SI 2023/911, which creates the dutyholder and competence duties on clients, principal designers, designers, principal contractors and contractors for all building work in England. If you have been told to budget for a per-square-metre levy on a Scottish scheme of ten or more units, that advice was written for a different jurisdiction.
Everything in the middle is identical. CIS is UK-wide: 20% and 30%, the 19th and the 22nd, the reinstated nil return for mainstream contractors from 6 April 2026, and the anti-fraud package with its 30% penalty reaching directors personally. So is the VAT domestic reverse charge, the £90,000 registration threshold, Making Tax Digital, the £1,000,000 annual investment allowance, and the 55p mileage rate.
The same work whichever trade you are in, because the problems are the scheme's rather than the trade's. We run the monthly CIS return and verification cycle, apply for and protect gross payment status, get the reverse charge right on your invoices and get end user notifications on file, put your records on software that satisfies Making Tax Digital, run payroll with the CIS offset claimed monthly through the employer payment summary, and prepare the accounts and tax return.
Two things we do that a general accountant usually does not. We reconcile your CIS suffered to the payment and deduction statements every month rather than once a year, which is where under-claimed materials and missing statements turn up — see the records guide. And we treat your VAT compliance as part of your CIS position, because since 6 April 2024 it literally is: VAT joined CIS, PAYE, income tax and corporation tax in the gross payment status compliance test.
We write for each trade separately, because the scope questions differ. An electrician is inside CIS on power, lighting and fire protection and outside it on burglar alarms and CCTV. A steel fabricator is outside the scheme on manufacture and delivery to site and inside it on erection. A scaffolder is inside CIS, and separately hired scaffolding is standard rated for VAT even on a zero-rated new build. There are pages for plumbers, roofers, groundworkers, joiners, bricklayers, plasterers and every other trade we act for.
Three free calculators, no email required: the CIS deduction calculator shows what materials do to a deduction, the gross payment status checker tests you against all three statutory tests, and the reverse charge checker works through the six conditions on a specific job.
Yes, on income tax. Scotland sets its own rates and bands on non-savings income, which is what a sole trader's or a partner's trading profit is — so the 20%, 40% and 45% rates and the £50,270 higher rate threshold quoted elsewhere on this site are for England, Wales and Northern Ireland and are not what applies to a profit earned in Edinburgh. National Insurance is reserved and unchanged: Class 4 at 6% then 2%, Class 2 treated as paid at or above the £7,105 Small Profits Threshold, and employer Class 1 at 15% above £5,000. Corporation tax and dividend tax are also reserved, so a Scottish limited company is taxed identically to an English one.
No. Both of the regimes most often described as though they were UK-wide are England instruments. The Building Safety Levy comes from The Building Safety Levy (England) Regulations 2025, SI 2025/1236, commencing 1 October 2026, and does not apply in Scotland. The dutyholder and competence duties on clients, principal designers, designers, principal contractors and contractors come from The Building Regulations etc. (Amendment) (England) Regulations 2023, SI 2023/911, and are likewise England only. If you have been advised to budget for a per-square-metre levy on a Scottish scheme, that advice was written for another jurisdiction.
Less than most trades expect, and not the things they expect. Edinburgh is in Scotland, and the Construction Industry Scheme is UK-wide: 20% standard rate, 30% higher rate, the monthly return due by the 19th and the money by the 22nd. The VAT domestic reverse charge, the £90,000 registration threshold, Making Tax Digital, National Insurance, corporation tax and the £1,000,000 annual investment allowance are identical too. What changes is building safety — the Building Safety Levy is England only, so it does not apply to a Scottish site at all, and SI 2023/911 is an England instrument, so the dutyholder and competence duties it creates do not extend here — and the income tax on your profit, which is Scottish rates and bands on non-savings income, set by the Scottish Parliament and not the same as England's.
No. We act for trade businesses in Edinburgh and across the UK remotely — phone, WhatsApp, video and email, with records and approvals handled online. That is deliberate rather than a limitation, because what decides a trade's tax position is not local knowledge but knowing the scheme: whether the work is a construction operation within CIS, whether the payment is CIS-reportable, whether your customer has notified end user status in writing, whether the materials figure on your invoice will stand up, and whether you should have gross payment status. None of that is answered by being twenty minutes down the road. What being in Scotland does change is building safety and, on income tax, scottish rates and bands on non-savings income — and we take that into account without needing an office here. The calculators on this site are free and need no conversation at all.
A free call about your CIS position, your VAT treatment and what is actually locked up. If we cannot save you anything, we will say so.
One short email: what has changed in CIS and construction VAT, the dates coming up, and one number worth checking on your own invoices. No spam, unsubscribe any time.