Most engineers don’t set out to do research and development. They set out to solve a problem on a deadline. But sometimes solving that problem means going somewhere the British Standards and Eurocodes haven’t caught up with yet — and that’s precisely the territory that qualifies for R&D tax relief.

That’s what happened when a structural engineering client came to us partway through the design of a high-rise residential tower.

The brief that broke the standard playbook

The project centred on post-tensioned flat slabs, which is a common enough technique in high-rise construction. What wasn’t common was the load scenario the design team had to accommodate: the potential future removal of a supporting column, on a scale that pushed well past the extreme load cases the existing British and Eurocode methodologies are built to handle.

There was no off-the-shelf calculation method for this, no established design guide, no precedent the team could simply adapt. To keep the design safe, compliant, and buildable, the engineers had to develop an entirely new analytical approach from first principles – one capable of demonstrating structural robustness under a scenario the existing codes don’t anticipate.

That’s a real engineering achievement. It’s also, under HMRC’s rules, a textbook example of qualifying R&D.

Why “clever” isn’t the same as “qualifying” – and why

HMRC doesn’t award R&D relief for good engineering. It awards relief for work that resolves genuine scientific or technological uncertainty in a field; uncertainty that a competent professional couldn’t simply resolve by looking it up, consulting a code of practice, or making a phone call to a manufacturer. Since the merged R&D expenditure credit scheme came into effect for accounting periods starting on or after 1 April 2024, that bar has, if anything, been applied more rigorously, with HMRC now expecting a detailed Additional Information Form to accompany every claim.

This project cleared that bar comfortably. There was no established UK or Eurocode-based methodology for the load scenario in question. The client had to develop and validate a new analytical approach, working through the underlying structural uncertainties rather than applying known formulae. That’s the advance in capability – beyond what already existed in the field, not just beyond what the client personally knew – that HMRC’s tests are designed to identify.

Where we came in

We worked alongside the technical team to translate what they’d already done into an R&D relief claim that would hold up.

In practice, that meant:

  • Sitting down with the engineers to unpick exactly which parts of the project were routine design work and which represented a genuine departure from established practice
  • Documenting the technical uncertainties the team faced and the systematic process used to resolve them, in the language HMRC’s guidance actually asks for
  • Building a claim narrative and supporting evidence aligned with current HMRC compliance expectations, rather than a generic write-up bolted onto the accounts

Firms doing this kind of work often don’t think of it as research and development at all – it’s just what a Tuesday looks like when a project throws up a problem nobody’s solved before. That’s usually the biggest barrier to claiming, not the technical bar itself.

The result of the R & D claim

The claim was accepted, delivering a meaningful reduction in the client’s tax liability that would otherwise have gone unclaimed. More usefully, it improved cash flow at a point in the project when working capital was under pressure – freeing up funds that could be reinvested rather than tied up, and giving the practice a documented record of the innovation sitting inside what looked, from the outside, like a standard high-rise contract.

Getting certainty before you commit the resource

One of the hardest parts of a case like this isn’t the claim itself, rather the uncertainty engineers bear while the work is still underway. Is this genuinely new ground, or is a competent professional elsewhere already working this out? Committing weeks of senior engineering time to a novel analytical approach is a real cost, and finding out only at year-end whether HMRC agrees it was R&D is not a comfortable position to be in.

HMRC has recently introduced two routes designed to close that gap. Full claim advance assurance lets an eligible SME – i.e. turnover under £2 million, fewer than 50 employees, and making its first-ever R&D claim – get HMRC’s agreement on a full claim before it’s submitted, with that assurance then covering the company’s first three accounting periods. For SMEs who’ve claimed before, a newer targeted advance assurance pilot allows assurance on up to two specific areas of a claim – including, usefully for a project like this one, whether a particular piece of work meets the definition of R&D for tax purposes at all, alongside questions on overseas expenditure, contracted-out work, or the PAYE and National Insurance cap.

Neither route is a substitute for good record-keeping, and neither is available to large companies or where a return is already under enquiry. But for smaller structural, architectural and engineering practices weighing up whether an unusual project is worth documenting as it happens, asking HMRC the question up front, rather than finding out at the claim stage, is now a genuine option.

The pattern behind the project

This kind of activity is more common in the built environment than most architects, engineers and design consultancies realise. Novel structural solutions, unproven jointing details for modern methods of construction, bespoke M&E integration, and the development of digital construction workflows such as BIM can all contain qualifying activity, even when the finished building itself looks entirely conventional.

As Pavel Stupin, R&D Tax Director at UHY Williamson Croft, puts it: the innovation is usually already there in the project files, buried in design iterations, calculation notes and the back-and-forth with building control, it just hasn’t been recognised or translated into a claim. The work of an R&D adviser is less about spotting brand-new ideas and more about sitting with the technical team long enough to see which parts of a familiar-looking project were, in fact, anything but.

If your practice has recently had to solve a problem the codes don’t cover, it’s worth asking whether that work could support a claim of its own. Get in touch with our R&D tax team to find out.