Money help when you’re on benefits.

Most people land here looking for one thing: money, quickly. The reason this site is organised as a ladder rather than a list is that the four options are not equivalent, and the cheapest one is rarely the one that advertises hardest.

A grant is money you do not pay back. A council award from the local crisis fund is a grant, and it does not reduce your benefits. There is no national grant that covers everything — what exists is a set of separate schemes tied to particular costs, plus a discretionary fund run by your own council, with its own rules, its own application route and its own opening and closing dates. Two neighbouring councils can run completely different schemes, which is why there is a page for each one rather than a single national explainer.

Below grants sit the interest-free options from the DWP. They cost nothing in interest, but they are still credit: a Budgeting Advance or Budgeting Loan is repaid out of your future payments, so the money comes back off your award for months afterwards. That is worth knowing before you apply, not after.

Credit unions come next. They are capped by law at 3% a month, they will look at an application that a bank would not, and they are the cheapest place to borrow if you have to borrow at all.

Commercial credit is last for a reason. On a low income the arithmetic is unforgiving, and a repayment that looked manageable in the application form can stop being manageable the first month something else goes wrong. If you are at that point, the guide to borrowing on benefits sets out what it actually costs and what it does to a means-tested award.

We are an independent publisher, not a lender, a broker or part of the DWP, and we make no money from sending you to a lender. Every figure on the site is taken from a primary source — GOV.UK, legislation.gov.uk, the FCA Handbook, or the council’s own page — and dated, so you can see when it was last checked. How we work and how we are funded.

Where you live changes the answer more than most people expect. The Household Support Fund is an English scheme; Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland run their own crisis funds with their own rules, and maternity and school-uniform help differ by nation too. Within England the variation is council by council: the same circumstances can produce an award in one borough and a refusal in the next, and some councils only accept applications referred through an adviser rather than direct from the public.

Schemes also open and close. Councils run their funding in tranches and can pause applications without notice, so a page that was accurate last month can be wrong today. Every page here carries the date it was last checked, and each figure links back to the source it came from. If something has moved on, the official page linked from our guide is always the position that counts — not ours.