Discretionary Housing Payments in Scotland: 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2026

Management information expenditure figures are for the actual spend on DHP awards for the 6 months from 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2026.

Chart 2 shows the proportion of DHP actual spend by award purpose. The majority was spent mitigating the Removal of the Spare Room Subsidy (£77.2 million, 82.9%), with a smaller proportion used to support claimants affected by the benefit cap (£5.4 million, 5.8%), and Local Housing Allowance (£3.6 million, 3.8%). A further £6.7 million (7.2%) was spent on Core (non-welfare reform) + HEAP awards and around £282,000 (0.3%) on awards that covered a combination of purposes (not labelled).

Chart 2: Management Information - Proportion of DHP actual spend by funding stream

Table 5 and Chart 3 show the total actual spend as a proportion of the estimated funding allocated for each funding stream.

Local authorities spent £5.4 million (57%) of their allocated funding for Benefit Cap mitigation. This is a lower proportion of benefit cap budget as was spent in 2024-25 (64%), although 9% more was spent overall from a larger budget (£9.5m v £7.7m), and there is a wide range of take-up across local authorities.

Local authority allocations were set in-line with the December 2024 Scottish Fiscal Commission forecasts. In their more recent January 2026 forecasts the Commission had reduced their benefit cap forecast from £9.5 million to £6.1 million. Local Authority spending against this revised benefit cap forecast was 89%. A similar situation exists for Removal of the Spare Room Subsidy where the Commission reduced their forecast by £1.8 million in January 2026, meaning local authorities spent 99% of the updated forecast.

Local authorities are free to spend their “Other” DHP funding at their discretion on any of the permitted purposes of DHPs, because they are best placed to respond to local housing needs. Allocations of “Other” DHP funding is therefore notional.

Local authorities spent less than their estimated allocations for Local Housing Allowance (97%, £3.6 million), and for Core funding (92%, £6.7 million).

Chart 3: Management Information - Proportion of estimated 2025-26 DHP funding spent (actual) by funding stream

Chart 4 shows the expenditure profile of each local authority. Whilst the Scottish Government provides funding under the different streams, for Local Housing Allowance or Core (or a combination of the two) this is a notional split and local authorities have discretion around how they use their funding. These have therefore been combined in this chart as ‘Other’.

Chart 4: Management Information - DHP actual funding spent by each local authority broken down by funding stream