The Scottish Welfare Fund: Crisis Grants, Community Care Grants and how to apply

The Scottish Welfare Fund is Scotland's scheme of emergency and settling-in grants, run by each of Scotland's 32 councils and funded by grants from the Scottish Government, which councils can top up themselves. It pays two grants: a Crisis Grant for an emergency or disaster, and a Community Care Grant to help you set up or keep a settled home. Neither is a loan, and neither has to be paid back. The fund was established on 1 April 2013, and it has had a legal footing since 1 April 2016, when the Welfare Funds (Scotland) Act 2015 and the Welfare Funds (Scotland) Regulations 2016 replaced the earlier non-statutory arrangements. That is what sets it apart from the schemes in England and Wales. Who can apply, the limit on Crisis Grants, and the deadlines for decisions and reviews are all written into regulations, and councils must also have regard to statutory guidance from the Scottish Ministers, most recently reissued in March 2026. The Act also requires councils to treat applicants with respect and to preserve their dignity. It is still a budget-limited fund, so when money runs short a council can raise the priority an application needs before it pays out. In 2025/26 councils awarded £52.0 million in grants, and £546.8 million has been paid out since the fund began.

Section 2 of the Welfare Funds (Scotland) Act 2015 gives a welfare fund exactly two uses, and each grant matches one. A Crisis Grant meets an immediate short-term need arising from an exceptional event or exceptional circumstances, where the need has to be met to avoid a risk to someone's wellbeing. In practice that usually means money for food, gas or electricity, and after a disaster such as a fire or flood it can also cover items like a cooker or furniture. A Community Care Grant helps someone establish or maintain a settled home when they have been, or might otherwise end up, in prison, hospital, a care home or another institution, or homeless or living an unsettled way of life. It is normally given as goods, such as cookers, beds and furniture, or as removal costs, and the average award in 2025/26 was £720, against £130 for a Crisis Grant. The practical differences follow from that split. A Crisis Grant must be decided by the end of the next working day and is limited to 3 in any 12 months. A Community Care Grant can take up to 15 working days, has no annual limit, and is not normally given if you have savings over £700, or £1,200 above pension age. By law a Crisis Grant should be paid in a form that does not tie you to a particular use, unless another form is to your advantage, though it does not have to be cash. The table further down sets the two side by side.

You must be 16 or over and live in the council's area, be about to move there, or be homeless; a council can also help someone stranded in its area to get home. You need to be on a low income, but not necessarily on benefits. If you get Universal Credit, income-based Jobseeker's Allowance, Income Support, income-related Employment and Support Allowance or Pension Credit, the regulations stop the council treating your income as too high, and there is no published income figure for anyone else. The council also looks at any savings or other help you could use instead. The key test in the statutory guidance is how severe your situation is and its likely impact on you and your family. Examples on mygov.scot include needing help with food or heating, a fire or flood at home, escaping domestic abuse, a grandparent taking over a child's care while benefits are transferred, and a gap in income after redundancy or a change at work. How the emergency came about does not matter, even if you could have avoided it. Where a gap in income has no known end, such as waiting for the DWP, the guidance says an award should usually cover two weeks of living expenses, and for someone on Universal Credit whose next payment is more than two weeks away it can cover longer, for example four weeks. Since 2025/26, the statutory guidance has pointed councils to the rates in the Joseph Rowntree Foundation's Universal Credit Essentials Guarantee as the normal basis for living-expense awards. You do not need a National Insurance number, and a DWP sanction does not stop you applying.

Regulation 6 of the Welfare Funds (Scotland) Regulations 2016 lists five situations. A Community Care Grant can help you establish or maintain a settled home after at least 3 months in prison or a care institution, any part of it within the 9 months before you apply, or after two or more separate stays in a care institution in that time; stay in your home rather than go into a care institution; set up or keep a home after being homeless or living an unsettled way of life; keep your home when you or someone in your household is facing exceptional pressure; or care for someone released from prison or a young offenders' institution on temporary licence. Exceptional pressure means more than the pressure of living on a low income, which on its own does not count: the guidance's examples include a risk to a child's health, a relationship breakdown or domestic abuse that led to a move, and moving on from temporary accommodation. The same age, residence and low-income rules apply as for a Crisis Grant, and savings matter more: a grant should not be made if you or your partner have savings over £700, or over £1,200 above pension age, though disability benefits and money earmarked for special purposes are ignored. A council does not have to decide an application while you are in a care home or hospital unless discharge is planned within eight weeks, or in prison unless release is planned within twelve weeks. You can apply up to twelve weeks before you leave, and the council can agree an award in principle, for example once a tenancy is signed. Awards can include furniture, a cooker, fridge, washing machine, bed and bedding, removal and storage costs, and gas and electricity connection charges.

Regulation 11 bars any item on the statutory guidance's list of exclusions, and Annex A of the March 2026 guidance lists 22. The ones people most often run into are rent in advance and rent deposits, which the guidance points to a Discretionary Housing Payment instead; debts, including rent arrears, mortgage arrears and council tax arrears, although an emergency amount for a prepayment fuel meter can be paid; the costs of pregnancy or a new baby, which Social Security Scotland's Best Start Grant and Best Start Foods cover; funeral costs, which the Funeral Support Payment covers; televisions and radios, unless you have a particular need such as limited mobility or isolation; a telephone, unless it is for a personal alarm, and mobile phones and call charges; holidays; court costs and fines; needs arising outside the UK; and ongoing expenses that are, or are likely to become, a regular part of your spending. Anyone whose immigration leave carries a no recourse to public funds condition is excluded, because the guidance says a grant can affect their legal status, and people waiting for an asylum decision are excluded too. Refugees can apply on the same basis as anyone else, and people from the EU with settled or pre-settled status are eligible. The guidance also says a council should not refuse you because you owe it money, such as council tax arrears, and that a grant should not be used to pay a debt to the council. For most excluded items the guidance names another source of help, and a decision letter should tell you about other support that may be available.

You apply to your own council, not the Scottish Government. mygov.scot links to the Scottish Welfare Fund page of each of the 32 councils, and each council must publish its own application procedure on its website. Councils must take applications through three channels, for example online, by phone and face to face, and must offer a face-to-face application to vulnerable people for whom that is the most suitable route; paper forms can also be accepted, for example from people in or leaving prison. Someone else can apply for you if you tell the council you are content for them to. Your council is also who you contact to check progress, as there is no national tracking service. You can only get help from a council other than your own if you are stranded away from home and need a Crisis Grant to get back, or in exceptional circumstances. Expect to be asked about your income, savings, household and what has happened. The council may check with others, such as a support worker, but the guidance says decision makers should not use social media to gather information. If a council declines to consider a second application for the same thing within 28 days, that is the repeat rule in regulation 8: it does not apply if the new application is different in nature, the first was never decided, or your circumstances have changed. If an earlier award was too small, the guidance says a review is usually a better route than a new application.

The deadlines are set in law. A council must decide a Crisis Grant immediately once it has all the information it needs, and in any event by the end of the next working day, a deadline written into both the 2015 Act and regulation 13 of the 2016 Regulations. The statutory guidance defines a working day as 9am to 4.45pm, Monday to Friday, excluding public holidays, so an application made after 4.45pm counts as received the next working day. A Community Care Grant must be decided by the end of the 15th working day after the council has everything it needs. Decisions come in writing unless you ask otherwise, with the reasons and how to ask for a review. mygov.scot puts it more loosely, saying most councils decide a Crisis Grant within 2 working days and that some are taking longer. In 2025/26, 98% of Crisis Grant applications and 89% of Community Care Grant applications were processed within target. On numbers, regulation 9 limits you to Crisis Grants on 3 applications in any 12 months, counted across every council in Scotland, so moving does not reset it. The guidance measures the 12 months from the date you received an award, gives each partner in a couple their own three, and counts travel awards towards them. A council can go beyond three in exceptional circumstances: normally a new, unforeseen cause you could not have avoided, not the everyday pressures of a low income such as budgeting or benefit deductions. Community Care Grants have no annual limit. Application history was the most common reason Crisis Grants were refused in 2025/26, at 27% of rejections.

There are two levels, and both are free. First, ask your council for a review within 20 working days of being told its decision. The request should be in writing and signed, by letter or email, though a council can accept it another way, for example by phone, in exceptional circumstances, and can accept a late request for good reason. Someone who took no part in the original decision carries out the review, and the law says a review cannot reduce or take away anything you were already awarded. The council must decide by the end of the second working day for a Crisis Grant, or the 15th working day for a Community Care Grant. In 2025/26 councils changed 36% of the Crisis Grant decisions and 41% of the Community Care Grant decisions they reviewed. If you are still unhappy, ask the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman for an independent review within one month of receiving the council's review decision; the Ombudsman can accept a later request in some circumstances. You can ask in writing, online or by phone on the free line 0800 014 7299. The Ombudsman can change the council's decision, tell it to decide again, or leave it as it is, and never reduces an award. It aims to decide within one working day for a Crisis Grant and 21 working days for a Community Care Grant, once it has all the information. One limit: if the fund was empty when you applied, the Ombudsman cannot make an award. Complaints about how you were treated, rather than about the decision, go through the council's complaints procedure first.

No. The statutory guidance says getting a Crisis Grant or Community Care Grant has no impact on your eligibility for any other benefit, and the Universal Credit rules bear that out. Both grants are local welfare provision, which regulation 2 of the Universal Credit Regulations 2013 defines as occasional help from a local authority, the Scottish Ministers or the Welsh Ministers either to meet an immediate short-term need arising from an exceptional event or circumstances, or to establish or maintain a settled home: the same two purposes the 2015 Act sets. Under paragraph 18A of Schedule 10 to those Regulations, a payment received within the past 12 months by way of local welfare provision is disregarded as capital, and because local welfare provision is not on regulation 66's list of unearned income, it is never counted as income either. The capital point only matters if your savings are near the limits: Universal Credit ignores capital below £6,000 and ends entitlement above £16,000, which the savings and capital calculator works through. The guidance adds that the grants are ignored for Council Tax Reduction and Legal Aid, and are not taxable. Nothing is ever deducted from your Universal Credit to repay a grant, because the Act does not allow councils to make loans. That is the difference from a Universal Credit advance, which DWP recovers from your payments, usually within 24 months: see the guide to deductions and advances and the advance payment calculator. Where the need is severe, the guidance says a council should pay a Crisis Grant while a DWP advance application is still in progress.

A Scottish Welfare Fund grant cannot pay rent in advance, a deposit or rent arrears, and that is where a Scottish Discretionary Housing Payment comes in. You apply to the same council, but it is a separate scheme. If you rent your home and get Housing Benefit or the Universal Credit housing element, a Discretionary Housing Payment can help if you are affected by the bedroom tax or the benefit cap, and it can also help with removal costs, rent in advance, a tenancy deposit, or rent the Local Housing Allowance does not cover. The housing element guide explains how those shortfalls arise. Discretionary Housing Payments continue in Scotland because their replacement by the Crisis and Resilience Fund in April 2026 applies to England only; England's councils now pay Crisis Payments and Housing Payments under that fund, as the Crisis and Resilience Fund guide explains. Wales runs one national scheme rather than a council-by-council one: the Discretionary Assistance Fund pays Emergency Assistance Payments and Individual Assistance Payments, with its own limit of 3 grants in a rolling 12 months, set out in the Discretionary Assistance Fund guide. In Northern Ireland, Discretionary Support can be an interest-free loan rather than a grant; the Universal Credit in Northern Ireland guide covers it. Which scheme you use depends on where you live.