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HMRC’s CT600P form is now mandatory for all creative sector tax relief claims from April 2026. Find out what it covers, what to file, and how to stay compliant.
If you’re making a creative industry tax relief claim this year, there’s a new form to add to your list. Whether you work in film, TV, animation, video games, theatre, orchestras or museums or gallery exhibitions, HMRC’s CT600P now applies to you. Miss it, and your claim won’t be processed.
This is the biggest change to creative industry tax relief filing since HMRC introduced the Additional Information Form (AIF) in 2024. If you claimed last year without any issues, that doesn’t mean this year will run as smoothly.
From 6 April 2026, every company claiming a creative industry relief or expenditure credit must file the CT600P alongside its Company Tax Return.
The CT600P is a new supplementary page to your Company Tax Return (the CT600) which lets HMRC know how you calculated your tax credit. It brings together all creative industry tax reliefs and expenditure credits into one form, filed at the same time as your main return.
Before CT600P, separate sector-specific supplementary pages applied to film, high-end TV, video games, theatre and the rest, each handled slightly differently. HMRC has been consolidating compliance forms across all of their tax credit incentives, and the CT600P is the result for the creative sector: one form for all creative reliefs.
If you want a refresher on the underlying rates and how the reliefs work, our creative sector tax reliefs review has the full picture.
You can find HMRC’s CT600P form here.
The CT600P is required for any Corporation Tax return filed on or after 6 April 2026. That date refers to when you file, not to your accounting period.
So, if your company has a December 2025 year-end and you’re filing your return now, you already need the CT600P. It doesn’t matter that the accounting period predates April 2026—it doesn’t even matter if your production was completed well in advance of this date. If the return goes in from 6 April 2026 onwards, the form must be included.
If you leave it out, HMRC won’t process your claim. That’s not a penalty situation, but it does mean a delay to any repayment you’re expecting. For companies claiming close to the deadline, forgetting the CT600P could risk the entire credit if you don’t leave enough time to resubmit your claim properly before the deadline.
The CT600P form covers all current and legacy creative sector tax reliefs.
These legacy reliefs are still available in their transitional window until 31 March 2027. After this point, all companies will need to move over to the Audio-Visual Expenditure Credit, or to the Video Games Expenditure Credit for games.
Productions that begin principal photography before 1 April 2025 can continue using the old tax relief schemes until 31 March 2027. However, productions where principal photography begins on or after 1 April 2025 must use the AVEC scheme.
For AVEC and VGEC, the form has three sections, each covering a different part of the relief calculation.
Note: there are different relevant sections for those claiming legacy tax reliefs.
This is where you report qualifying expenditure and credit entitlement. This is now aggregated by production type rather than by individual production.
So if you have a slate of animation projects, you report the total qualifying expenditure for all of them in one row, and your total AVEC entitlement in the next column, not a separate line per title.
For the accounting period, you’ll enter the combined amount of:
If you’re claiming under AVEC, you need to group any productions of the same time (i.e., two films would be grouped together, but an animation’s total would be kept separate from the films’).
Here’s a simple example. Company A is a mid-size animation studio that produced two series during the year. Instead of completing separate calculations for each production, it reports the combined qualifying expenditure and total AVEC entitlement for its animation slate in a single row of Section 1. The detail behind those totals sits in the production-level workings, but the CT600P itself keeps it high level.
It has £1,000,000 in global expenditure on those productions in the period. In this period, £800,000 of that expenditure was UK-based. Of that £800k, £500,000 relates to core production costs (i.e., is qualifying expenditure). The company then claims 39% of the £500,000, giving them £195,000 in an expenditure credit.
Our guide on how to calculate creative tax reliefs walks through the underlying maths if you need it.
This section covers how your AVEC or VGEC entitlement is applied. It mirrors the credit redemption calculation you’ll already be doing, but it now needs to be formally captured on the return itself rather than handled separately.
The first thing to do is to assess if you can carry any amount forward from a previous period or claim an expenditure credit that was surrendered by another group member. Then you enter your Corporation Tax liability. In some cases, the credit will only be used to reduce your tax bill and the journey ends here. However, if any surplus exists, it can be claimed as a payable cash credit.
The next step is called ‘Step 2’ and makes sure loss-makers receive the same net benefit as profit-makers. A notional tax charge is applied to the credit if your Corporation Tax liability did not reduce it enough. Any payable credit should be worth the expenditure credit net of tax at the main rate of Corporation Tax. If any credit was lost in the calculation of Step 2, it can be carried forward to the next accounting period.
After this notional tax rate, you must use the amount remaining to offset any outstanding Corporation Tax liabilities, e.g., from previous accounting periods. You can then choose whether you’d like to surrender any of your credit to a group member. Finally, you must use the credit to discharge any other liabilities (like Bank Levies, controlled foreign company tax, PAYE or VAT).
After you’ve filled in all these steps, you should now know how much of the credit is payable to you.
If your company surrenders credits to other companies in your group, this is where you record that. This is only relevant to those with a credit restricted at Step 2 by the notional tax rate.
The calculation works differently for the creative sector tax reliefs. You’ll need to enter for the accounting period:
As with the expenditure credits, you should group your productions by category.
For accounting periods beginning before 1 April 2024,
Both forms are still required. Think of them as covering different ground: the AIF handles the project detail and the cost breakdown at production level. The CT600P handles the numbers that feed directly into the tax return.
HMRC also released an updated version of the AIF on 6 April 2026, designed to work alongside the CT600P. The key change is that the AIF no longer captures expenditure credit redemption, since that’s moved onto the CT600P.
If your structure uses a special purpose vehicle (SPV) to hold a production, with the credit then surrendered up to a parent company, Section 3 is where you record it.
HMRC expects the standard details: the receiving company’s UTR, the amount being surrendered, and the accounting period it relates to. The underlying principles are the same as existing group surrender rules, so if you’ve done this before, it won’t be unfamiliar.
HMRC has acknowledged a validation issue where some returns error on submission when the CT600P is included. A fix is scheduled for April 2027, and in the meantime HMRC has issued an interim workaround.
Software vendors are rolling out updates at different speeds, and the first filing cycle for any new HMRC form tends to surface edge cases that weren’t obvious in testing. More issues may be flagged in the coming weeks and months and you should factor this into the timing of your submission.
There are a few practical steps worth taking before your next filing:
The CT600P just changes the paperwork around the claim. Companies that get ahead of the new format now will protect their cashflow from filing delays that were entirely avoidable.
If you’d like support with your CT600P filing or want to make sure your claim is structured correctly, get in touch with the Myriad team.
HMRC’s CT600P form is now mandatory for all creative sector tax relief claims from April 2026. Find out what it covers, what to file, and how to stay compliant.
Films, high-end TV, children's TV and animations are eligible for the Audio-Visual Expenditure Credit. Find out the qualifying criteria to get up to 53% back.
Your core expenditure is the foundation of your VGEC claim. Find out which costs count, when you can claim them and what the exceptions are for the credit.
Please contact us to discuss how working with Myriad can maximise and secure R&D funding opportunities for your business.
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