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 in August or September.

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 as its own Table_1_* sheet 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.

From the September 2026 edition the film, TV, animation and video games tables report the legacy tax relief alongside the expenditure credits that replace it: the Audio-Visual Expenditure Credit (AVEC), the Independent Film Tax Credit (IFTC) and the Video Games Expenditure Credit (VGEC). For those sectors this function returns HMRC's "total" columns, which cover the legacy relief and the credits together and are the columns HMRC says to use when comparing years. The split by relief type is not returned.

Examples

# \donttest{
op <- options(hmrc.cache_dir = file.path(tempdir(), "hmrc"))
try({
  film <- hmrc_creative_industries(sector = "film")
  tail(film)
})
#> ℹ Resolving download URL from GOV.UK Content API
#> ✖ Resolving download URL from GOV.UK Content API [246ms]
#> 
#> ℹ Resolving download URL from GOV.UK Content API
#> ✔ Resolving download URL from GOV.UK Content API [186ms]
#> 
#> ℹ Downloading data file
#> ✔ Downloading data file [664ms]
#> 
#> ℹ Parsing data
#> ✔ Parsing data [108ms]
#> 
#> # Creative Industries tax relief statistics (Table 1)
#> # Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/creative-industries-statistics-september-2026
#> # Fetched 2026-11-01 14:05:10 UTC | Vintage: latest | Cells: accruals | Freq: annual | 6 rows x 7 cols
#> 
#>    sector tax_year companies claims productions relief_gbp_m
#> 14   film  2019-20       830    950         955          627
#> 15   film  2020-21       675    760         800          418
#> 16   film  2021-22       725    820         880          521
#> 17   film  2022-23       810    905         995          550
#> 18   film  2023-24       815    945         990          504
#> 19   film  2024-25       885   1145        1025          702
#>                  status
#> 14            Unchanged
#> 15            Unchanged
#> 16              Revised
#> 17              Revised
#> 18 Provisional, revised
#> 19          Provisional
options(op)
# }