Take-up rates of Scottish benefits - 2026

Annex A: Take-up methodology

There are three steps to estimating take-up rates. These are first summarised in principle below and then applied to the benefits included in this publication.

Step 1: Calculate the number of people that received the benefit.

Step 2: Estimate the number of people eligible to receive the benefit, including those who did and did not receive the benefit.

Step 3: Divide the number of benefit recipients by the estimated number of people eligible to receive the benefit.

Step 1. All Benefits

• Published data or monitoring information requested from Social Security Scotland is used to calculate the number of recipients for each benefit.

Step 2. Scottish Child Payment, Best Start Grant and Best Start Foods

• Data from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) on the number of children by age group in families in receipt of Universal Credit or Tax Credits is used to calculate the proportion of eligible children for these Scottish benefits.
• This proportion is then multiplied by the total number of births or children in the specific age range for each of these Scottish benefits. This produces our estimate of the number of eligible children for these benefits.
• For Best Start Grant, a household is eligible if they receive a qualifying benefit for at least one month within the application window, a turnover adjustment is applied, to capture households who receive payments who are not in the qualifying benefit caseload in a given month.

Step 2. Scottish Child Payment and Best Start Foods (local authority estimates)

• Data from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) on the number of children by age group, and local authority, in families in receipt of Universal Credit is used to estimate the number of children in each local authority eligible.

Step 2. Young Carer Grant

• Data from the Scottish Surveys Core Questions is used to estimate the proportion of 16- to 19-year-olds providing at least 16 hours of unpaid care per week.
• This is multiplied by the number of people aged 16 to 19, to estimate the number of eligible young people.
• Young carers who receive Carer’s Allowance or provide care to someone not in receipt of a qualifying disability benefit are subtracted from the estimate of the eligible population, as they are not eligible for the benefit.

Step 2. Job Start Payment

• DWP provided aggregated estimates of the number of people in receipt of Universal Credit living in Scotland aged 16 to 24, who had no earned income (according to HMRC earnings data) for a period of at least six months prior to receiving some income from employment. We believe this provides the best available estimate for the number of people eligible for the Job Start Payment.
• An adjustment is made to account for the requirement to work 12 or more hours per week.

Step 2. Funeral Support Payment

• Data from DWP's Stat-Xplore and the Family Resources Survey (FRS) is used to estimate all people in Scotland who are in receipt of a qualifying benefit, and the status of their household as a single person or a couple.
• This is then used to estimate an eligibility rate for single person households, couple households and households overall. Eligibility rates are defined in this way as single households are more likely to be in receipt of benefits than couple households and it is assumed that for couple households, a partner is likely to be the person responsible for organising a funeral in the event of a death.
• These eligibility rates are then multiplied by the corresponding number of deaths estimated to occur in single, couple and households overall, to estimate the number of people eligible for Funeral Support Payment.

Step 3. Calculation of take-up rate

• Divide the number of benefit recipients by the estimate of the eligible population to estimate the take-up rate.