Subsidy Control and Innovate UK Grants: What Every Applicant Needs to Know

If an Innovate UK competition page mentions "Minimal Financial Assistance" or a "streamlined subsidy route," it is telling you which legal basis your grant is being awarded under, and that basis caps how much public money you can hold at once. Most applicants only meet this the first time a competition manager flags it mid-application. Here is what the rules actually say, sourced from UKRI and gov.uk, as of 23 September 2026.

Subsidy control in plain terms

Subsidy control is the UK's post-Brexit replacement for EU State aid law. Since 4 January 2023, most public money given to a business, including Innovate UK grants, has had to comply with the Subsidy Control Act 2022 rather than the old EU regime (UKRI funding rules). The Act exists to stop public bodies handing out unlimited support that distorts competition, and it does this by sorting subsidies into tiers based on size and risk.

For an Innovate UK applicant, only two of those tiers matter in practice: Minimal Financial Assistance (MFA), which covers the great majority of Innovate UK grants, and the Research, Development and Innovation (RDI) Streamlined Subsidy Scheme, which Innovate UK uses when an award is too large to fit inside MFA. Which one applies to your award is decided by Innovate UK when it designs the competition, not something you choose on the application form, but it changes how much you can receive and what else you can hold at the same time.

Minimal Financial Assistance: the £315,000 cap explained

MFA lets a public authority award a business up to £315,000 over a rolling three-financial-year period without running the full subsidy control assessment (gov.uk's subsidy control quick guide). "Rolling" means the window moves with you: it covers the elapsed part of the current financial year plus the two financial years immediately before it, recalculated every time a new award is considered. It is not a once-in-your-company's-lifetime allowance, and it does not reset neatly at the start of April.

Two things catch applicants out about what counts toward the £315,000:

• It cumulates across funders, not just Innovate UK. Any MFA award from any UK public authority counts, as do EU de minimis awards received before the Act came into force and small amounts of assistance under the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement.
• It is reported once it gets large enough. Individual MFA awards of £100,000 or more must be uploaded to the UK's subsidy transparency database, and recipients must keep their own records for at least three years, so a false answer on the application form is checkable.

Competitions that run entirely on MFA tend to say so plainly. A recent Innovate UK Innovation Funding Service competition, for example, states outright that "your total costs will be eligible for up to 100% funding subject to MFA subsidy rules," with a single fixed grant amount rather than a percentage the applicant negotiates. When a competition is structured this way, your job is not to calculate an intensity rate, it is to confirm you have headroom left under the £315,000 cap.

When an Innovate UK award isn't MFA

Some competitions offer grants well above what MFA can cover, sometimes into six or seven figures per project. Those run instead under the RDI Streamlined Subsidy Scheme, introduced under section 10(4) of the Subsidy Control Act 2022 specifically to let research and innovation funding move at pace without a full case-by-case assessment.

The RDI route works differently from MFA in three respects that matter for planning a bid:

Under the RDI route, funding rates follow the same size-and-activity structure the UK inherited from the old EU framework. For industrial research, published Innovate UK competition terms give up to 70% of eligible costs for a micro or small organisation, 60% for a medium-sized one, and 50% for a large organisation, with a further 15% available where the project is a genuine collaboration involving an SME or a research organisation. Experimental development projects sit lower, in the region of 45% for small enterprises down to 25% for large ones, before any collaboration uplift. These figures come from the RDI Streamlined Route guidance itself rather than from any one competition, so treat the exact rate on your competition brief as the number that governs, not this general pattern.

The practical upshot is that the RDI route and MFA are separate tracks. A company can hold an MFA-based grant and an RDI-streamlined grant at the same time without one eating into the other's ceiling, because they are assessed under different legal provisions.

What this means if you're applying across multiple years or funders

The £315,000 MFA ceiling is per organisation, not per competition or per funder, so it is easy to approach without noticing if you apply to Innovate UK repeatedly, or to Innovate UK and a separate public grant scheme (a local authority innovation fund, an Innovation Voucher, another UKRI council) in the same rolling window. A company that has taken, say, £180,000 in MFA grants over the last two years has £135,000 of headroom left, not £315,000, and a new MFA-based Innovate UK award has to fit inside that remaining figure.

This is a genuine reason a company can be eligible on every other criterion and still not be able to take an award as structured. If a competition is MFA-only and your remaining headroom is smaller than the fixed grant amount on offer, that mismatch is worth identifying before you spend weeks on a full application, not after you are asked to confirm your subsidy history at award stage.

How to check your position before you apply

Three checks are worth doing before you commit time to a bid that depends on MFA:

• List every public subsidy your company has received in the current financial year and the two before it, including grants from other government bodies, not just Innovate UK.
• Check whether the specific competition you are targeting is MFA-based or RDI-streamlined. The competition summary or funding rules section on the Innovation Funding Service page will state this directly.
• If you are close to the £315,000 line, ask Innovate UK's competition team directly rather than guessing. They hold the authoritative view of your subsidy history against their own records, and a five-minute query is cheaper than a rejected award letter.

Where GrantHero fits in

Subsidy control is exactly the kind of check that is easy to defer until it is too late, because it sits outside the application form itself. As part of scoping a competition, GrantHero's platform and expert reviewers look at whether the funding structure on offer, MFA or RDI-streamlined, actually fits what you need and what you are eligible to hold, before you invest time drafting. That is the same judgement behind our brand promise: we would rather flag a mismatch early than let you find out at award stage. See what is included at each level on our pricing page, and if you are still working out whether a specific Innovate UK competition suits your company at all, our guide on Innovate UK eligibility covers the criteria that sit alongside subsidy control.