Worked examples of R&D claims are usually written to make the relief look larger than it is. This one is written the other way: it starts from a project that plainly qualifies and shows where the numbers get smaller, because the narrowing is what a first-time claimant needs to see before they set an expectation.
The project and the raw numbers
A twelve-person software company spends a year building a scheduling engine. Four developers work on it, on employment costs of £70,000 each including employer national insurance and pension, so £280,000 of staff cost is in scope on any reading. There is £18,000 of cloud compute, £6,000 of software licences and £40,000 paid to an external specialist for an optimisation component. On a naive view the project cost £344,000 and the claim is built on that.
The two narrowings
First, time. The four developers spent roughly 70% of the year on this project and the rest on support and other work, so £196,000 of staff cost is attributable to it. Second, the qualifying window. Of the twelve months, the first two were specification and the last three were productionising, testing against requirements and documentation, none of which is resolving a technological uncertainty. Seven months qualify, so the claimable staff cost is about £114,000, with cloud and software apportioned the same way to roughly £14,000.
What reaches the return
The subcontractor payment is restricted and depends on who bore the risk and set the objectives, which here is the company, so a proportion of the £40,000 comes in. Total qualifying expenditure lands somewhere near £145,000 rather than the £344,000 the project cost, and the relief is computed on that. The lesson is not that the claim is small; it is that the claim is a proportion of a proportion, and a company that has not recorded what its people worked on cannot evidence either fraction.
Questions people ask about r&d claim example
How much of a project's cost can be claimed?
Only the qualifying categories, apportioned twice: by the share of each person's time spent on the project, and by the part of the project that was resolving a technological uncertainty rather than specifying or productionising.
Why does the qualifying window matter so much?
Because it often covers less than half the project. Work before the uncertainty is identified and after it is resolved is outside the claim, however necessary it was.
What records support a claim?
Contemporaneous project time records above all, plus the technical narrative explaining what the uncertainty was and why it was not readily resolvable by a competent professional in the field.