GASDS – top tips for charity and charity treasurers on claiming Gift Aid for small donations

The Gift Aid Small Donations Scheme (GASDS) gives UK charities and churches a way to claim Gift Aid on small cash or contactless card donations of £30 or less where no Gift Aid declaration has been given.

Examples include cash collected during street collections in buckets, in donation boxes or wall safes in churches, museums and art galleries, or in collection plates and offering bags during church services.

Through the Gift Aid Small Donations Scheme, your charity or church can receive up to £2,000 additional income a year.

In the 2024/25 tax year, UK charities claimed around £40 million through GASDS. The scheme allows charities to benefit from tax relief on small, anonymous donations they receive. This income would otherwise attract no tax benefit at all.

In this article, we cover 10 key things for charity treasurers to know about GASDS. These top tips cover the rules and pitfalls to be aware of to help maximise the amount of Gift Aid your charity or church can claim back from HMRC.

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

1. To claim GASDS, you don’t need to know who made the donation

Unlike standard Gift Aid, GASDS doesn’t require you to identify the donor or hold a Gift Aid declaration for them. It’s designed for situations where it simply isn’t practical to collect donor details. For example, a church collection plate or a street bucket collection. 

As long as each donation is £30 or less, and is collected in the UK, it can qualify. This £30 limit applies per individual donation, not to the total money collected. For example, you can claim GASDS on a collection containing contributions from 50 people, even if the overall total collected is more than £30.

If it’s possible to identify a single gift over £30 within the amount you collect (for example, a £50 bank note) then you should exclude this gift. However, HMRC states that you can take a common sense approach. For example, if a donor gives £25 weekly, but puts two weeks’ worth of donations into the same envelope, you can treat both gifts as eligible small donations.

It is less likely to be appropriate to claim GASDS on a single large donation given at a one-off event (for example, a Christmas service). However, in reality, if the donor placed their gift into the collection (without an envelope), there would be no way of knowing that one donor had given a large cash donation. Therefore, it would be okay to claim GASDS.

Donations and the Gift Aid claimed on these must be used for the charitable purposes of the charity or church.

To qualify under GASDS, a donation has to be an outright gift. That means it’s freely given, with no benefit received by the donor in return for the payment, beyond something of negligible value like a lapel sticker. Where a payment is required (e.g. ‘minimum payment of £5 to attend’), this is not eligible under GASDS. It’s worth noting that membership fees do not qualify under the Gift Aid Small Donation Scheme. However, they can qualify under the general Gift Aid scheme.

2. GASDS applies to contactless donations as well as cash donations

Since April 2019, GASDS has been extended beyond just cash donations to include contactless card payments of £30 or less.

So if your charity or church uses a card reader for donations, you can include those small contactless gifts in your GASDS claim. 

This is still not widely known, and many organisations are missing out as a result.

While GASDS can be claimed on contactless card donations as well as cash, GASDS can’t be claimed on online card donations.

For charities and churches using ExpensePlus as their fund accounting software to create their charity accounts, ExpensePlus is able to automatically track which donations are eligible for GASDS. It uses the ‘donation method’ by which a donation was given to ensure that eligible donations given by either ‘cash’ or ‘contactless card’ are included.

3. The GASDS limit is £2,000 per tax year

Your charity can claim GASDS on up to £8,000 of small donations per tax year. At the 25% rate of tax relief, that’s a maximum of £2,000 you can receive back from HMRC. 

As GASDS is per tax year (6 April to 5 April the next year), you need to track which donations fall in which tax year. This is regardless of the dates of your charity’s financial year.

Surprisingly, many eligible charities and churches don’t know about the GASDS scheme or assume it’s too complicated. As a result, many miss out entirely on the extra income this scheme provides.

With fund accounting packages like ExpensePlus, the software takes care of everything for you – paying for itself many times over! It also takes care of managing the GASDS limit to ensure you don’t claim too much.

4. Charities with multiple buildings may be able to claim more GASDS

You may qualify for the Community Buildings scheme if:

• your charity or church uses multiple community buildings – such as a church, village hall or community centre and;
• it hosts at least six charitable or worship events in the relevant buildings per year; and
• each event is attended by at least 10 people.

The Community Buildings scheme allows larger organisations to claim GASDS on up to £8,000 of donations per qualifying building, rather than being limited to a single £8,000 allowance across the whole charity.

For full details about this, you should read the guidance on the HMRC website carefully.

ExpensePlus has functionality for the Community Building scheme built in. This makes GASDS easy to manage, and ensuring you keep within the limit for each building.

5. You must claim Gift Aid to claim GASDS

This catches many charity treasurers out. You cannot use GASDS in isolation. Your charity must have already made a successful Gift Aid claim in the same tax year before submitting a GASDS claim.

HMRC uses this as a check to ensure only active, compliant charities benefit from the scheme.

It is also worth noting that the amount your charity can claim in GASDS can’t be more than 10 times what you claimed in Gift Aid in that tax year.

For example, if your charity only claims Gift Aid on £500 of donations in a tax year, your GASDS claim is capped at £5,000 of small donations – not the full £8,000. 

Most charities claim more than enough in Gift Aid to be eligible for the full GASDS limit. Just don’t forget to submit your Gift Aid claim before submitting a GASDS claim in any given tax year.

6. You have two years to claim GASDS

You must submit GASDS claims to HMRC within two years of the end of the tax year in which you received the donations. 

So, for donations collected in the tax year ending 5 April 2026, you must claim by 5 April 2028. 

This is a shorter deadline than the one that exists for Gift Aid, so don’t leave it too late.

As with Gift Aid, you can submit multiple GASDS claims in any given tax year. You can submit claims manually via the HMRC portal. Or if you use ExpensePlus, which directly integrates with HMRC, you can submit claims more quickly.

7. Keeping records is required for GASDS

GASDS record-keeping is considerably simpler than for standard Gift Aid. You have no donor declarations to collect or store. But records are still required, and HMRC can and does check them.

For each GASDS collection, the charity must keep details of:

• the total amount collected
• the date of the collection, and
• the date the money was paid into the bank.

If you use an accounting package such as ExpensePlus, you can record this information when entering the bank deposit details.

For contactless card donations, you must also keep a record of the card transactions. Typically, you can download a statement of transactions from the online portal linked to your card reader.

8. Donations must be deposited into a UK bank account

It’s worth noting that to claim on donations through the Gift Aid Small Donation scheme (GASDS):

• donations must be made in the UK, and
• the money collected must be deposited into a UK Bank account that’s kept by or on behalf of the charity.

This means you can’t use GASDS to claim on donations or collections if you keep the cash without banking it. For example, if you hold the collected money within a petty cash tin.

9. You can claim GASDS on donations where you know the donor’s name

If you know who the donor is, you can still claim GASDS on their cash or contactless card donations of £30 or less. However, you can only claim GASDS if they do not have a Gift Aid declaration in place with your organisation.

If you know who the donor is and they have a Gift Aid declaration, you must use the Gift Aid scheme for their donations, not GASDS.

As many charities don’t know that you can include donations from donors you know, potential GASDS income remains unclaimed.

For charities using ExpensePlus, there is a unique feature that ensures you don’t miss out on this GASDS income. That’s because ExpensePlus automatically includes in your GASDS claim any eligible named donations of £30 or less, that have been given by either cash or contactless card reader, where the donor doesn’t have an active Gift Aid declaration.

10. A penalty from HMRC can block your GASDS claim

If your charity has received a penalty from HMRC in connection with a Gift Aid or GASDS claim – even a relatively minor one – you will be unable to claim GASDS in that tax year or the following one. 

This is another reason why accurate record-keeping and careful Gift Aid administration really matter.

How ExpensePlus simplifies the management of GASDS 

Rather than manually tracking donations that are eligible for GASDS, ExpensePlus is able to do this for you. All of the GASDS rules are built into the accounting software, so you don’t have to spend time working out and collating a list of donations to claim.

ExpensePlus automatically creates GASDS claims for your charity or church, ensuring that all eligible donations are included – not just income that has been recorded as eligible for GASDS, but eligible named donations too!

ExpensePlus has HMRC Gift Aid integration built in, meaning you can submit GASDS claims at the click of a button, in the same way as for Gift Aid claims