Business Grants Scotland 2026: What's Open Now

A note before you read: Grantsights makes grant-search tools for United States money only, so there's nothing for sale on this page and every link goes to the agency or council that holds the money. If you'd like to hear if we ever cover Scottish funding, register your interest from the UK. For the broader picture across England, Wales and Northern Ireland, our start-up grants UK guide is the overview; this page goes deeper on Scotland only.

Which Agency Covers Your Business: The Three-Way Split

Scotland has 3 enterprise agencies, and the one you deal with depends on where the project happens, not where your head office is. HIE alone covers about 50% of Scotland's land mass. Getting this wrong wastes weeks, because Scottish Enterprise's grant pages tell projects in the other two areas to contact their local agency first.

For every council and agency scheme in one place, Scotland's public directory Find Business Support (opens in a new tab) is the search to run first. It lists funding by area and stage, and it's run by the Scottish Government.

Scottish Enterprise: Fewer, Bigger Grants Since the Funding Model Changed

Scottish Enterprise now funds a small number of large projects, at support rates of 20% to 50% depending on the scheme and your size. According to Scottish Enterprise's business grants and funding calls page (opens in a new tab), it will "still be delivering a few targeted grants" and is putting more effort into pointing businesses to funding from partners. Here's what that leaves, as read on 31 October 2026:

The R&D grant. It's for developing a new product, process or service, or significantly improving one. You can't apply as a sole trader or a charity, and you're likely to be ruled out if most of the R&D is done by third parties, if work has already started, or if the change is routine. The page says some or all of the grant may be repayable in certain circumstances.

The capital grant. It replaced RSA as Scottish Enterprise's route for capital projects. Your business can be based outside Scotland, but the project must happen here, must be mainly funded by the private sector, mustn't offset job losses elsewhere and mustn't relocate activity from England, Wales or Northern Ireland. Scottish Enterprise also says benefits limited to a local area are unlikely to be funded. That rules out most shops, cafés and trades.

Fair Work comes with the money. Every Scottish Enterprise grant page lists the same conditions: the real Living Wage for everyone aged 16 and over, an effective worker voice such as trade union recognition, no inappropriate zero-hours contracts, opposition to fire and rehire, and a credible plan to reach net zero by 2045 at the latest.

The loan scheme has sector exclusions. The Scottish Loan Scheme page lists retail, events, restaurants, hotels, pubs and clubs, social and personal services, professional services, motor vehicles and property among the restricted sectors, unless the business is a technology company or has a disruptive model.

If your project is technology-led but smaller than £1 million, UK-wide competitions are the realistic route; our Innovate UK grants guide explains how those competitions are scored.

Highlands and Islands Enterprise: Smaller Grants, More of Them

HIE is still a hands-on grant giver: in Grantsights analysis of its approval lists, 54% of its approvals to outside organisations in the year to June 2026 were under £25,000. On 31 October 2026 its support pages listed four business grants that any eligible firm in the region can ask about, each through an enquiry form:

All four ask you to get up to 3 quotes and choose your own supplier, and all four expect you to pay part of the cost. The technology grants say businesses mainly in retail, hospitality, personal services or general business services are unlikely to qualify unless they're building a clearly new tech venture. The adoption capital grant excludes shops, pubs, cafés, restaurants, hairdressers, lawyers and accountants outright, plus B&Bs run from the owner's home.

The wage rule is specific. HIE's pages say any organisation applying for grant funding must pay all employees aged 16 and over at least the real Living Wage of £14.10 an hour. If you pay the 2025 rate of £13.45, you have until 1 May 2027 to move up.

HIE's approval lists also show programmes that don't have an open page today, such as the Green Grant Fund 2024-28, the Young Business Capital Grant and the Graduate Placement Programme. Treat those as signs of what an HIE account manager can offer, not as open calls.

South of Scotland Enterprise and the Scottish Borders and Dumfries and Galloway

SOSE covers 2 council areas and publishes every grant it makes each quarter. According to the SOSE grant award data it publishes, in 2024/25 SOSE supported 2,156 businesses, social enterprises and community groups, of which 558 received grants totalling £10.3 million. So about 26% of the organisations SOSE worked with that year got a grant; the rest got advice and other support.

Two SOSE schemes have their own pages:

• AI Adoption Grant (opens in a new tab): a revenue grant of £1,000 to £5,000 for SMEs and social enterprises in the Borders or Dumfries and Galloway. On 31 October 2026 the page said it was paused while applications are processed and was expected to resume in early November 2026, with all spending finished by 31 January 2027. It's first come, first served, so register interest now if you want it.
• Pathways (opens in a new tab): coaching for women and people from other under-represented groups, with grant funding of up to £1,000. You can't apply for the grant on its own; you have to be working with a Pathways coach first.

Bigger SOSE grants come through an adviser rather than an open scheme. That's where the large awards in the data below came from. If you're a community group rather than a business, our community grants UK guide covers councils and community foundations.

Council and Business Gateway Grants: What Exists in 2026-27

Local grants are where most small Scottish businesses will find money, they usually last 12 months, and they change every financial year. Two examples verified on 31 October 2026:

• Highland Council: a £1,000 start-up grant for people starting a new business, delivered by Business Gateway Highland and funded through the UK Shared Prosperity Fund, according to the Highland Council start-up grants page (opens in a new tab) (last modified 23 July 2026).
• South Lanarkshire Council: the South Lanarkshire Business Growth Grant (opens in a new tab) pays up to 50% of eligible costs, from £5,000 to £20,000, capped at 10% of your latest annual turnover. You need 12 months' trading, a project worth at least £10,000, and one application between 1 April 2026 and 31 March 2027. It pays after you show the spending.

Why local grants are shrinking. Many council grants were paid for by the UK Shared Prosperity Fund. According to GOV.UK, in the UKSPF 2025-26 guidance (opens in a new tab) says no funding will be provided for activity after 30 September 2026. Its Scottish successor, announced on 8 January 2026, is a £140 million Local Growth Fund (opens in a new tab) for 2026/27 to 2028/29, split between Glasgow City (£60.9 million), Edinburgh and South East (£37.8 million), Tay Cities (£19.5 million), Ayrshire (£11.8 million) and Forth Valley (£9.8 million). Nine council areas get no allocation from it: Argyll and Bute, Highland, Moray, the Western Isles, Orkney, Shetland, Aberdeen City, Aberdeenshire and Dumfries and Galloway. If you're in one of those, check with Business Gateway whether a UKSPF-funded grant is still running before you plan around it.

What 614 HIE and SOSE Awards Show

Grantsights analysis of the two agencies' published lists covers grants approved from 1 July 2025 to 30 June 2026. The headline: the typical award is far below the Scottish Enterprise minimum, and a handful of big capital projects take most of the money.

Data: HIE quarterly approvals lists for July to September 2025, October to December 2025, January to March 2026 and April to June 2026; SOSE grant award lists for the same four quarters; all downloaded 31 October 2026 from HIE's funding approvals page (opens in a new tab) and SOSE's grant awards page (opens in a new tab). HIE figures exclude projects HIE runs itself ("HIE Own Hand", 60 approvals) and the separate appendices described below, and combine HIE's grant-in-aid with any conduit funding it administers. Amounts are approvals, not payments.

At HIE, 54% of approvals were under £25,000, but the 8 approvals of £500,000 or more took £11.0 million, more than a third of the total. Those included £1,931,647 to Cooke Aquaculture Scotland for a hatchery (October to December 2025), £1,572,584 to Dornoch Distillery Company for its Struie distillery (January to March 2026) and £1,545,000 to Lecht Ski Company (July to September 2025).

By HIE area team:

By HIE programme (matched on project titles, so a few awards may sit outside these rows): Digital and Technology Adoption approvals numbered 34 with a median of £5,000 (from £1,500 to £175,000); Green Grant Fund approvals numbered 23 with a median of £48,420; Young Business Capital Grants numbered 7 with a median of £40,000; Graduate Placement awards numbered 14 with a median of £15,600; and 20 Peatland Restoration Fund equipment grants had a median of £17,017. A case in point: Craggie Farm Limited received £79,387 under the Digital and Technology Adoption programme, and Aviemore Distillers Ltd received a £75,000 Young Business Capital Grant, both in April to June 2026.

What sits outside the main table. HIE's lists also carry appendices. The Islands Business Resilience Fund, a £4.4 million Scottish Government fund for island businesses hit by ferry disruption, appears as 215 grants worth £1,342,000 in October to December 2025, then 210 top-ups worth £909,228 and 229 second-round grants worth £2,123,748 in January to March 2026. Round 2 closed at 5pm on 12 January 2026, according to HIE's deadline notice (opens in a new tab). The January to March 2026 list also shows 477 Pathways to Start grants of £1,500 each (£715,500), with names withheld to protect personal data.

SOSE by area. Dumfries and Galloway projects received 91 awards worth £6.51 million (median £10,000) and Scottish Borders projects 92 awards worth £3.57 million (median £5,863). Another 8 awards worth £1.56 million covered both areas, and 18 awards worth £170,467 went to businesses outside the South through the Scottish Government's Small Producers Pilot Fund, which SOSE delivered across most of Scotland in January to March 2026. The biggest SOSE award was £1,500,000 to Arla Foods in Lockerbie in April to June 2026 to install three 2MW heat pumps for cheesemaking. At the small end, Apothecally Ltd in Castle Douglas received £15,000 in the same quarter for kitchen equipment.

Limits of this data. These are approvals, so some won't be paid in full. Rows where a long client name wraps across lines were counted by amount, but the name may be shortened. Refused applications aren't published, so there's no success rate. And neither agency's list covers Scottish Enterprise's area, where most Scottish businesses are.

What Scotland's Enterprise Agencies Don't Tell You

The agencies' pages are clear about rules. Read alongside the award lists, a few things they don't spell out become plain. Only 2% of HIE's approvals (8 of 405) reached £500,000, and SOSE's median award was £8,700.

Scottish Enterprise isn't a small-business grant funder any more. With a £250,000 minimum grant and a £1 million project floor on both open grants, a café, a trades business or a five-person agency won't qualify, however good the plan. If you're in Scottish Enterprise's area and smaller than that, your realistic routes are council grants, competitions and loans. Honest advice: don't spend a week on an enquiry form that can't succeed.

Most grants are discretionary, so meeting the criteria isn't enough. Scottish Enterprise's capital and R&D pages both say meeting every minimum requirement doesn't mean you'll be funded. HIE and SOSE make the same point in different words. Expect a conversation and an appraisal, not a tick-box form.

Starting early kills applications. Scottish Enterprise rules out projects where work has started or contracts are signed, and the SME Loan Scheme won't fund measures where you've paid a deposit before the written offer. This is the most common mistake on business grants everywhere, and it's fatal here too.

Social enterprises have a different set of funders. If your business is asset-locked, the trusts in our grants for community interest companies guide are open to you, which an ordinary company can't say.

The wage condition is a real cost. HIE's £14.10 an hour floor applies to every employee aged 16 and over, including apprentices. For a seasonal tourism business with young staff, that can cost more over a year than a small grant pays. Run the numbers before you apply.

Location trumps head office. A Glasgow company opening a site in Moray deals with HIE for that project. An Inverness firm expanding in Ayrshire deals with Scottish Enterprise. Ask the agency for the project's postcode, not yours.

Your timeline needs months, not weeks. None of the three agencies publishes a decision time for its main grants. Scottish Enterprise asks for an enquiry form, then an appraisal meeting; HIE and SOSE assign an adviser. Plan for an appraisal before any purchase is committed.

Loans, Competitions and Investment When There's No Grant

Most Scottish businesses that need money will end up borrowing or competing. Four options that aren't grants but are worth knowing:

• SME Loan Scheme (energy and carbon upgrades): run by Energy Saving Trust for the Scottish Government through Business Energy Scotland (opens in a new tab). Loans of £1,000 to £130,000 are interest-free and repaid over 8 years. Energy efficiency measures can get 75% cashback up to £20,000, and heat pumps, biomass or solar thermal 75% up to £10,000, with £30,000 the most any business can receive. Private landlords and commercial boats can't apply, and work mustn't start before the written offer.
• Scottish EDGE: Scotland's biggest business funding competition. According to Scottish EDGE's competitions page (opens in a new tab), the main category offers up to £100,000 as a mix of grant and loan, Young EDGE offers grants of up to £15,000 where all directors are under 30, and Wild Card EDGE offers grants of up to £15,000 to pre-trading businesses, sole traders and partnerships. Round 28 closed on 2 September 2026 and Round 29 opens in early 2027.
• Scottish National Investment Bank: a development bank, not a funder of grants. According to the Scottish Government's 2026 review of the Bank's performance (opens in a new tab) (published 17 August 2026), its minimum investment is normally £1 million and its maximum normally £50 million, and that the Bank "is not, and was not designed to be, a grant-giver".
• Start Up Loans and the start-up schemes: our start-up grants UK guide covers the UK-wide Start Up Loan, Firstport's Start It award for social entrepreneurs in Scotland and the King's Trust offer for 18 to 30 year olds, so they aren't repeated here.

Who Should and Shouldn't Apply

Match your stage and sector to the route below. If you've traded for under 12 months, most growth grants are out of reach, so start with the first row.

Red flag: if someone offers to "guarantee" a Scottish Enterprise or HIE grant for a fee, walk away. All three agencies take enquiries directly and free of charge, and Business Gateway advice is free.

How to Apply, Step by Step

Applying to any of the three agencies follows the same 5 steps:

1. Find the right agency for the project's location using the table above, or ask Business Gateway (opens in a new tab), which covers every council area.
2. Search Find Business Support for your area and stage, and note any council scheme's financial-year deadline.
3. Send the enquiry form before you commit any spending. Scottish Enterprise asks for a Word enquiry form by email; HIE and SOSE use online enquiry forms.
4. Prepare for appraisal. Have quotes (HIE asks for up to 3), recent accounts, a cash-flow forecast, evidence that other funding was considered, and your Fair Work position, including your lowest hourly rate.
5. Wait for a written offer and read the repayment terms. Scottish Enterprise says some or all of a grant may be repayable in certain circumstances, and HIE and SOSE release money only once you show the project went ahead.

Sources Checked

All sources were read or downloaded on 31 October 2026:

• Scottish Enterprise, funding and grants (opens in a new tab), business grants and funding calls (opens in a new tab), R&D grants (opens in a new tab), capital grant (opens in a new tab), Regional Selective Assistance (opens in a new tab), Scottish Loan Scheme (opens in a new tab)
• Highlands and Islands Enterprise, Technology Kickstart Grant (opens in a new tab), Technology Development Grant (opens in a new tab), Digital Specialist Advice grant (opens in a new tab), Digital and Technology Adoption Capital Grant (opens in a new tab), funding approvals lists (opens in a new tab) (July 2025 to June 2026), Islands Business Resilience Fund deadline notice (opens in a new tab)
• South of Scotland Enterprise, grant award lists (opens in a new tab) (July 2025 to June 2026), AI Adoption Grant (opens in a new tab), Pathways (opens in a new tab)
• Highland Council, apply for start-up grants and loans (opens in a new tab); South Lanarkshire Council, grants and funding for businesses (opens in a new tab)
• UK Government, UKSPF 2025-26 additional information (opens in a new tab) and £140m Scottish Local Growth Fund announcement (opens in a new tab) (8 January 2026)
• Scottish Government, Scottish National Investment Bank: review of performance 2026 (opens in a new tab); Find Business Support (opens in a new tab)
• Business Energy Scotland, SME Loan Scheme FAQs (opens in a new tab); Scottish EDGE, our competitions (opens in a new tab)