Music grants in the UK: who funds what

The UK has an unusually good set of funders for individual musicians, and an unusually good habit of publishing exactly who they will not fund. That second part is what this guide is about. I read all seven of these organisations’ own pages to build the funders section of the directory, and every one of them excludes a different group of people in the first two paragraphs of their guidance.

PRS Foundation

The biggest name, and the one with the sharpest gate. PRS Foundation funds people who write: "Songwriters | Composers | Artists, bands, producers or performers who write their own music", followed immediately by "We don’t support performers who don’t write their own music." Everything it runs sits behind that line, including the Open Fund for Music Creators, PPL Momentum Music Fund, Women Make Music, the International Showcase Fund, Hitmaker and The Composers’ Fund.

It is also the most calendar-driven funder in the country. Every deadline for every fund sits on one page, all of them at 6pm unless stated otherwise, and the funds recur through the year rather than once annually. If you write your own material, the correct move is to put that page in your calendar rather than checking it when you happen to need money.

Help Musicians

A charity that has supported professional musicians for over a century, and the one most likely to fund something small and urgent. Fast Track is up to £500, Fast Track Live is £500 to £1,000 plus a two hour career clinic with a live music specialist, and both exist for an opportunity you have in front of you rather than a plan for next year. Fast Track Live money can go on travel, rehearsal, accommodation, equipment, production and marketing tied to a live performance in the next six months.

Alongside those sit the named awards: the Peter Whittingham Jazz Award at £5,000, MOBO Amplified, the UK Rap Award with Tiffany Calver, the Electronic Music Award with DJ Mag, postgraduate study support and the Soundboard mentoring network. Their own framing is that they help "at times of crisis, but also at times of opportunity", and the charity also runs Music Minds Matter for mental health, which is worth knowing about separately from the grants.

The catch in their own words: they expect Fast Track Live to be highly competitive, and they want applicants who have control over some part of their career, "for example being self-managing, self-releasing or self-producing".

Sound and Music

The national charity for new music, and the source of the smallest and most practical grant on this list. The Essentials Fund is £250 to £450 for the things that unblock a composing practice: an online course, mentoring sessions, software, technical equipment, recording costs, venue hire, even a period of rehearsal or workshopping with collaborators. There is no requirement to finish a new work or to have a performance date.

It also publishes its own odds, which almost nobody does. Round one drew over 230 applications for 11 awards, round two over 280 for 13, round three over 400 for nine. Registrations were closed when I last checked, with Round Five flagged as the next one to watch, so this is a newsletter-signup funder rather than an apply-today funder.

Youth Music

The National Foundation for Youth Music funds music-making for young people. For a solo artist the relevant one is the NextGen Fund: grants of up to £3,000 for 18 to 25 year olds, or up to 30 if you identify as d/Deaf, Disabled or Neurodivergent, who have never received funding before and are facing real barriers. The grant recipient has to be a single person even if you collaborate on the project.

Their Trailblazer and Catalyser funds are for organisations and projects rather than individual artists, so if you are a solo act, the round dates that matter to you are the NextGen ones specifically. All of it runs in numbered rounds with published open, close and notification dates.

Creative Scotland

If you live in Scotland, this is the largest pot available to you as an individual. The Open Fund for Individuals runs on a £5 million annual budget and takes applications between £500 and £50,000 for research, development or delivery of creative activity for up to 24 months. It is open with no deadline, and it answers in 10 weeks for requests up to £20,000 or 14 weeks above that.

Eligibility is residency-based and strict: "Freelance and self-employed artists and creative practitioners living in Scotland who are at least 18 years old", with a UK bank account in your name.

Arts Council of Wales

If you live in Wales, Creative Practice pays £500 to £10,000 for creative experimentation, professional development and new ways of working, and Create and Engage offers small awards up to £10,000 or large ones up to £60,000. Read the exclusion before anything else: Creative Practice says plainly that the practitioners it cannot support include "musicians making commercial music", and that the fund is for developing your creative practice, not commercial ventures. Its two 2026 deadlines were 20 May and 9 September, and it asks for at least ten working weeks between the deadline and your project starting.

Arts Council of Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland's arts council runs named programmes for individuals, each with its own window. The one to know about as a performer is Musical Instruments for Individuals: it is for professional musicians living in Northern Ireland who perform at a high level solo or in a small group or chamber ensemble, in any genre, and who need an instrument central to their performing career. When I checked, it closed at noon on 15 October 2026, and it excludes anyone who received an award from the same programme in the previous eight years. National Lottery Travel Awards run on a rolling basis alongside it.

One gap, stated honestly

Arts Council England’s National Lottery Project Grants is the other name you will hear in England, and it is not in the directory yet. Every page on their site sits behind a bot check that automated fetching cannot read, and I will not write a listing from memory when the whole point of these entries is that the amounts and the eligibility wording are quoted from the funder’s own page. It is on the list to do by hand.

How to use this

Check the exclusion first, then the window, then write. Several of these are rolling and several are round-based, so the practical approach is to keep the PRS deadlines page and the Youth Music deadlines page bookmarked and to treat Help Musicians and Creative Scotland as the ones you can go to when something lands in your lap.

Every UK funder above is in the directory with its amount, its eligibility wording and its current window quoted from source, and I re-check those windows by hand every month because a closed round looks identical to an open one from the outside. Browse them at /funders?country=GB, or take a £19-a-year membership to open the rest of the directory too.