Working Age Scheme

Working Age Scheme criteria

The following table shows the level of discount you’ll receive based on:

• The number of people in your household.
• The total income you have coming in on a weekly basis.

These income bands are from 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2026.

More details

• The maximum amount of discount you can be awarded is 50% but if you are in the protected group the maximum is 77%.
• You will classed as being in the protected group if you would have been entitled to a disability premium, enhanced disability premium or a severe disability premium under the previous scheme.
• Where a household includes more than two children the income bands do not increase.
• Everyone of working age who is in receipt of Income Support, Job Seekers Allowance (income based) or Employment and Support Allowance (income related) will get the maximum available support.
• We will disregard income from Attendance Allowance, Disability Living Allowance, Personal Independent payments, Carers Allowance and Employment and Support Allowance, child benefit and child maintenance.
• War pensions are not included in the total of your income.
• No deduction is made for adults other than you and your partner living in your household.
• Net earnings are used in the assessment. Net earned income is worked out from the gross wage less tax, national insurance and 50% of any pension contributions.
• If you’re self-employed, we’ll calculate your income from either year-end accounts or day books (if you don’t have year-end accounts). If you’ve been trading for more than 12 months and your earnings are less than the national living wage rate at 35 hours (or 16 hours for a single parent), we’ll use an assumed income of 35 or 16 hours at the national living wage rate. This is known as the minimum income floor.
• You must have savings below £6,000, including stocks and shares and all your accounts. Some savings may be disregarded, so please ask for further details.

Income Disregards

We will apply:

• An earnings disregard of £25 per week.
• Universal Credit Element – the amount of Universal Credit which covers housing costs is not counted. Potentially other elements of your Universal Credit award will not be counted depending on your circumstances.

The income levels in the table above are after any income that is not counted.

Even if you think your income is higher than the band shown, do not let this stop you from claiming.

You can apply for Council Tax support below. You’ll need to have the following details ready to enter into the online form

• Details of the income and benefits received by you and your partner (if you have one).
• The total balances for all your savings and accounts, for you and you partner. This includes stocks, shares Premium Bonds and all accounts e.g. current, savings Post Office and building society accounts.

Apply for Council Tax Support

If you are newly in receipt of Universal Credit and you have told the Department for Work and Pensions that you wish to claim help with your Council Tax, your details will be supplied directly to us and you do not need to fill in the form.

Where you share your tenancy with other people (who are not your partner) you will each need to make an application for Council Tax Support.

You will be told when you complete the form what evidence you will need to supply. You can attach your proof to the application form or supply it at a later date by completing form Benefits Evidence Request Form and attaching your documents. This must be within one month of you submitting your application.

You can submit the following types of evidence:

• Image files – format GIF, JPG, TIF, PNG or BMP (maximum file size is 5000MB).
• PDF files – you can upload PDF copies of evidence (maximum file size 5000MB).
• The form does not support the upload of other file types such as DOC/DOCX (Microsoft Word) or xlx/xlsx (Microsoft Excel). If you want to submit evidence in this file type, you must save it first as a PDF document. This can be done by clicking ‘Save As’ in the file menu in Microsoft Word or Excel and selecting ‘PDF’ from the ‘Save As type’ dropdown menu. You can then attach the PDF document to the form.

Council Tax Support backdated claims

If you are of working age, you could be entitled to up to three months of backdated Council Tax Support. You will need to tell us the period you want your claim backdated for.