Download HMRC Creative Industries tax relief statistics

Downloads and tidies Table 1 (annual time series) of the HMRC Creative Industries Statistics for each of the eight creative-industries reliefs: Film, High-end TV, Animation, Children's TV, Video Games, Theatre, Orchestra, and Museums and Galleries Exhibition. Published annually each August.

Usage

hmrc_creative_industries(sector = NULL, tax_year = NULL, cache = TRUE)

Source

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/creative-industries-statistics

Arguments

sector: Character vector or NULL (default = all sectors). Valid values: "film", "high_end_tv", "animation", "childrens_tv", "video_games", "theatre", "orchestra", "museum". Any relief HMRC adds to the release later (for example the Audio-Visual and Video Games Expenditure Credits) is included when sector = NULL, keyed by a snake_case version of its sheet name.
tax_year: Character vector or NULL (default = all years).
cache: Logical. Use cached file if available (default TRUE).

Value

An hmrc_tbl with columns:

sector: Character. Creative-industries sector identifier.
tax_year: Character. Tax year, e.g. "2023-24".
companies: Numeric. Number of companies (where reported).
claims: Numeric. Number of claims (where reported).
productions: Numeric. Number of productions (films, programmes, games, exhibitions, etc., where reported).
relief_gbp_m: Numeric. Amount of relief paid, GBP million.
status: Character. HMRC revision status (e.g. "Unchanged", "Provisional").

Details

Creative Industries reliefs are paid on an accruals basis. The latest tax year in each sector's table is provisional and uplifted by HMRC for claims not yet received; status is recorded in the status column. Sector tables differ slightly in their column set (films track productions, video games track productions, theatre tracks claims/productions, museums track exhibitions, etc.); columns absent from a sector's table are returned as NA.

Examples

# \donttest{
op <- options(hmrc.cache_dir = file.path(tempdir(), "hmrc"))
try({
  film <- hmrc_creative_industries(sector = "film")
  tail(film)
})
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#> ℹ Parsing data
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#> 
#> # Creative Industries tax relief statistics (Table 1)
#> # Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/creative-industries-statistics-august-2025
#> # Fetched 2026-09-13 19:24:17 UTC | Vintage: latest | Cells: accruals | Freq: annual | 6 rows x 7 cols
#> 
#>    sector tax_year companies claims productions relief_gbp_m
#> 13   film  2018-19       745    830         865          584
#> 14   film  2019-20       830    950         955          627
#> 15   film  2020-21       675    760         800          418
#> 16   film  2021-22       720    815         870          520
#> 17   film  2022-23       785    880         955          553
#> 18   film  2023-24       830    960         980          534
#>                  status
#> 13            Unchanged
#> 14            Unchanged
#> 15              Revised
#> 16              Revised
#> 17 Provisional, revised
#> 18          Provisional
options(op)
# }