CT600E for Charities and CASCs: Claiming Your Exemption with WeFile

If your company is a charity or a registered Community Amateur Sports Club (CASC), being exempt from corporation tax does not mean being exempt from the corporation tax return. When HMRC issues a notice to deliver, you still have to file — and the way you claim your exemption is through supplementary page CT600E.

CT600E is where you tell HMRC that the company was a charity or CASC throughout the period, that it is claiming exemption on all or part of its income and gains, and how much came in, went out, and moved through its assets. Get it wrong and you either lose the exemption for income you were entitled to shelter, or you file a return HMRC's gateway simply rejects.

CT600E is now supported in WeFile from end to end: every box from E5 to E200, a dedicated wizard step, automatic ticking of box 115 and the company type in box 4, a legacies and donations table that feeds box E88 automatically, correct handling of long periods that split into two returns, an HMRC-compliant route for accounts that cannot be filed as iXBRL, a printable CT600E form, and full Developer API coverage.

This article explains how the page works, what WeFile does automatically, and — just as importantly — the one thing it deliberately does not do for charities.

A charitable company is still a company. It is registered at Companies House, it sits inside the corporation tax system, and HMRC can issue it a notice to deliver a company tax return like any other.

What charities get is not an exemption from filing — it is an exemption from tax, and only where income and gains are applied for charitable purposes. Those exemptions sit in the Corporation Tax Act 2010 and they are claimed, not automatic. CT600E is the claim.

So the position for most charitable companies is:

• A CT600 must be filed whenever HMRC has issued a notice to deliver.
• CT600E must be attached to claim the exemption and report income, expenditure and assets.
• Tax may still be payable on any income or gains that fall outside the exemptions — for example non-primary-purpose trading beyond the small trading limits, or income not applied for charitable purposes.

The same broad framework applies to CASCs, with its own set of caps that we cover below.

WeFile supports the whole of CT600E. Not a subset, not "the main boxes" — the entire page, grouped exactly as the official form does:

The exemption claim (E5 – E45)

• E5 — Repayment reference (format XN123456; CASCs normally leave this blank).
• E10 — Charity Commission or OSCR registration number (charities only).
• E15 — Confirmation that the company was a charity or CASC and is claiming exemption. You tick this even if there was no income or gains at all in the period.
• E20 / E25 — The exemption position: all income and gains exempt, or some possibly not exempt.
• E30 / E35 / E40 — The declaration: name, status (Director, Trustee, Treasurer…) and date.
• E45 — Flag that tax has been over-claimed during the period.

Income (E50 – E90)

• E50 Total turnover from exempt charitable trading
• E55 Investment income
• E60 UK land and buildings
• E65 Gift Aid
• E70 From other charities
• E75 Gifts of shares and securities
• E80 Gifts of real property
• E85 Other sources
• E88 Legacy income — filled automatically from the legacies table
• E90 Total income — calculated for you

Expenditure (E95 – E125)

• E95 Trading costs
• E100 UK land and buildings
• E105 General admin costs
• E110 Grants and donations made within the UK
• E115 Grants and donations made outside the UK
• E120 Other expenditure
• E125 Total expenditure — calculated for you

Assets (E130 – E190)

The assets block is a two-column grid on the paper form — disposals in the period (total consideration received) on the left, additions in the period (accounts figures) on the right — and WeFile reproduces it exactly:

• E130 / E135 Tangible fixed assets
• E140 / E145 UK investments, excluding controlled companies
• E150 / E155 Shares in and loans to controlled companies
• E160 / E165 Overseas investments
• E170 Loans and non-trade debtors (additions only)
• E175 Other current assets (additions only)
• E180 Qualifying investments and loans (charities only)
• E185 Value of any non-qualifying investments and loans (charities only)
• E190 Number of subsidiary or associated companies controlled at the end of the period, excluding those dormant throughout

Legacies and donations (E195 – E200)

A repeating table of donor details with a total in E200. WeFile lets you add as many rows as you need, allocates each row to the right sub-period on a long period of account, and pushes the total straight into box E88.

On mobile and desktop alike, every field carries its official box number so you can tie the on-screen figure back to the paper form or to your accountant's working papers in one glance.

Almost everything else on the return follows from a single choice on the CT600E page.

Box E20 — all income and gains are exempt

Tick E20 if all of the company's income and gains are exempt from tax and have been, or will be, applied for charitable or qualifying purposes only. In practice, this is where the large majority of small charitable companies land.

Choosing E20 makes the return a nil corporation tax return. WeFile responds by:

• Skipping the Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet and Account Type steps entirely — they have nothing to contribute to a fully exempt return.
• Not generating a corporation tax computation, and telling HMRC why through the proper NoComputationsReason route.
• Neutralising any figures you may have entered before ticking the charity box, so no stale profit ever finds its way into a CT600 tax box.

That last point matters more than it sounds. It is the difference between a clean nil return and a return that quietly declares a corporation tax liability a charity does not owe.

Box E25 — some income or gains may not be exempt

Tick E25 if any part of the company's income or gains may fall outside the exemptions. You then have to complete the main CT600 for those non-exempt amounts, and WeFile keeps the Profit & Loss step visible for exactly that reason. It also generates an iXBRL corporation tax computation for the taxable element.

The critical discipline with E25 is not double counting: exempt amounts belong on CT600E and must be excluded from the main CT600 income boxes. The field help on the income boxes reminds you of this at the point of entry.

Whether a particular income stream is exempt is a question of tax law, not software. WeFile makes the mechanics of E20 and E25 straightforward, but if you are unsure which side of the line an activity falls on, take professional advice — that is not something we can give you.

Registered Community Amateur Sports Clubs use the same page but a slightly different subset of it, and WeFile adapts automatically as soon as you pick CASC rather than charity.

• Box E10 is hidden. A CASC is not registered with the Charity Commission or OSCR, so there is no registration number to give.
• Boxes E180 and E185 are hidden. The qualifying and non-qualifying investment boxes apply to charities only.
• Box 4 on the main CT600 is set to 6 (CASC) rather than 8 (charity).
• Exemption caps apply. The wizard shows a permanent reminder that trading turnover is capped at £50,000 a year and gross UK property income at £30,000 a year, pro-rated for a short period.

The cap is the trap. If a CASC breaches one, the whole amount of that income becomes taxable — not just the excess over the cap. A club that turns over £52,000 in trading does not have £2,000 of taxable income; it has £52,000 of it. In that situation the CASC must tick E25 and complete the main computation for that income stream.

If you switch a filing from charity to CASC after entering data, WeFile suppresses the charity-only boxes from the submission but never deletes what you typed. Switch back and it is all still there.

CT600E is not bolted on as a separate form. It is a step inside the same wizard you already use.

1. Step 1 asks the question. Alongside the dormant question, step 1 asks whether the company is a charity or a CASC. You can also set it when you first create the filing.
2. Step 10 "Charity" appears. Answer yes and a new step joins the wizard, split into five tabs that mirror the form: the claim, income, expenditure, assets, and legacies.
3. Irrelevant steps disappear. Balance Sheet and Account Type are removed for every charity and CASC filing. Profit & Loss is removed too if you ticked E20, and kept if you ticked E25. Navigation jumps cleanly between the steps that remain, forwards and backwards.
4. Totals calculate as you type. E90, E125 and E200 are computed, never typed.
5. The review step shows the page in full. Every CT600E figure appears on the final review screen with its box number before you commit to submitting.

The same gating applies wherever a filing is viewed — your own dashboard, the admin view, a white-label partner's portal, or an embedded client portal — so nobody ever sees a Balance Sheet tab on a charity filing that will never produce one.

Legacies get their own treatment on CT600E because HMRC wants donor-level detail, not just a total.

For each legacy you record the donor's forenames and surname, address, postcode, whether the donor was overseas, the date of the legacy and the amount. WeFile then:

• Validates the date against the period of account — a legacy dated outside the period cannot be saved, which stops one of the most common gateway rejections at source.
• Totals the rows into box E200 and mirrors that total into box E88 (legacy income), which is locked while the table has rows so the two can never disagree.
• Handles overseas donors properly — the postcode requirement and its UK format check are relaxed, and no empty postcode element is sent in the XML.
• Allocates each row to the correct return when a long period of account splits into two CT600s, based on the date of the legacy.

If you have no donor rows to list but do have legacy income to declare, E88 stays editable and you can enter it directly. The lock only applies where the table itself is providing the figure.

CT600E is not a standalone document you post separately. It travels inside the same submission as the main return, and it changes the main return in two specific ways — both handled for you:

• Box 115 ("supplementary pages CT600E enclosed") is ticked automatically as soon as you flag the filing as a charity or CASC.
• Box 4 (company type) is set automatically — 8 for a charity, 6 for a CASC.

Beyond that, the interaction depends on your E20/E25 choice. A fully exempt filing produces no tax figures in the main form at all. A partially exempt filing computes tax on the non-exempt amounts you entered in Profit & Loss, exactly as a normal trading company would — and the CT600E figures sit alongside as the exempt picture.

You never have to remember to tick a coverage box, and you cannot end up with a mismatched pair where the supplementary page says charity and the main form says ordinary trading company.

This is the one deliberate limitation, and it is worth understanding before you start.

For a normal small company, WeFile files both legs of the annual cycle: the CT600 with iXBRL accounts and computations to HMRC, and the accounts to Companies House. For a charity or CASC we file the HMRC leg only. The Companies House accounts leg is hard-disabled on charity filings, in every submit path in the product.

The reason is the accounts themselves. A charitable company has to prepare accounts under FRS 102 together with the Charities SORP — a trustees' report, a statement of financial activities, fund accounting, restricted and unrestricted reserves. FRS 105 micro-entity accounts are prohibited for charities. That is a genuinely different set of financial statements from the small-company accounts WeFile generates as iXBRL, and producing them incorrectly would be far worse than not producing them at all.

So we do not pretend. Your charity accounts must be filed with Companies House separately, by you or your accountant, and where applicable with the Charity Commission or OSCR. WeFile says this plainly in the wizard, on the documents list and on the review step, so it can never come as a surprise after submission.

The upside is that the part we do handle, we handle completely: the CT600 and CT600E go to HMRC, come back with an IRmark receipt, and the filing reaches completed without waiting for a Companies House leg that was never required.

HMRC's own rules allow a company tax return to be delivered without iXBRL accounts, provided a reason is supplied and appropriate documents are attached. WeFile uses exactly those routes:

• If you upload your charity accounts as a PDF (a dedicated upload sits on the charity step), the PDF is attached to the submission and HMRC is given the corresponding NoAccountsReason.
• If you do not upload accounts, WeFile generates a clear explanation letter as a PDF and attaches that instead, with the matching reason code.
• If the filing is fully exempt (E20), no corporation tax computation is filed either, and a NoComputationsReason is supplied on the same basis.
• If the filing is partially exempt (E25), a proper iXBRL corporation tax computation is generated and filed for the taxable amounts.

No iXBRL accounts are ever generated for a charity or CASC — not silently, not as a fallback. And this is not theory: a fully exempt charity return of exactly this shape, with no accounts document and no XBRL element at all, has been submitted to HMRC's gateway and accepted with a signed IRmark receipt. A 15-month split-period charity filing has been through the same test and both sub-period returns were accepted.

A corporation tax return can never cover more than 12 months. If your period of account runs longer — say 15 months after a change of year end — it has to be filed as two returns, and WeFile handles that for charities as it does for everyone else.

There is one important difference from the rest of the product. Most figures can be apportioned by time, but CT600E income, expenditure and asset figures are pure totals — they are not accruals and they cannot be reliably pro-rated. So WeFile asks you to enter the CT600E figures separately for each sub-period, and validates each sub-period on its own terms, because the XML is generated per return.

What is not optional is the exemption claim itself. E15 and the E20/E25 choice are mandatory on every CT600 a charity files for the period of account, so both returns carry the claim even where one sub-period has no figures at all. Legacy rows, meanwhile, are routed to the correct return by their date automatically.

HMRC's gateway applies business validation rules on top of the schema, and its error messages are famously unhelpful — a generic failure code with the real rule buried inside. WeFile checks the CT600E rules up front so you find out in the wizard, not in a rejection.

One example worth knowing about, because it catches people out:

Rule 9612 — if you have entered expenditure on UK land and buildings in box E100, then income from UK land and buildings in box E60 must be greater than zero.

WeFile flags that combination before you submit, per sub-period, rather than letting the gateway bounce your return. The same applies to the format rules HMRC enforces on free text and postcodes: postcodes are normalised, the repayment reference is uppercased, and characters the XML schema will not accept in the declaration are surfaced as a clear validation message rather than silently stripped.

Every charity filing gives you a complete paper trail, and the documents list only ever shows what genuinely exists for that filing:

• CT600 — the main return as a filled PDF of the official form.
• CT600E — the supplementary page as its own filled PDF, including the A3 landscape legacies page, named after your company and period.
• Corporation tax computation — for partially exempt (E25) filings only.
• The explanation letter or your uploaded accounts PDF, exactly as sent to HMRC.
• The submitted XML and the IRmark receipt, for your records.

You will not see an auto-generated Accounts row on a charity filing, and you will not see a Tax Computation row on a fully exempt one, because neither is produced. A short note on the documents list explains why, so the absence is never ambiguous.

A filing cannot be two contradictory things at once, and WeFile enforces that rather than leaving it to chance.

• Charity/CASC and dormant are mutually exclusive. A dormant filing is a specific, minimal shape of return; a charity claim is not. You pick one, and the rule is enforced on every save path including the API.
• CT600A and CT600E are kept mutually exclusive in the wizard. A charity making loans to participators is not a realistic scenario, and separating them keeps the wizard honest. Step 9 (Loans) is excluded from charity filings and step 10 (Charity) is excluded from dormant ones.
• Charity status is locked after acceptance. Once HMRC has accepted the return, the status is frozen along with the rest of the filing. Changing your mind means an amended return, not an edit.

Switching a filing's status never destroys the data you have already entered — it simply stops it being used. If you flip a filing to dormant and back to charity, your CT600E figures are waiting where you left them.

If you file at volume, CT600E is available through the WeFile Developer API exactly as it is in the interface. There is no interface-only feature here.

• Set charityStatus to charity or casc when you create or save a filing.
• Send the whole page as supplementaryPagesData.ct600e, including bySubPeriod figures for a long period of account.
• Fetch the ct600e_pdf document type alongside ct600_pdf.
• Submit to HMRC and poll for status through the same endpoints as any other filing.

The API mirrors the interface rules rather than relaxing them: the Companies House leg is refused for charity filings, accounts and — where fully exempt — computation documents are reported as unavailable rather than generated, and the dormant/charity exclusivity is re-asserted server side. It is all documented at /api-docs, and the API package is a standalone £500/year subscription with a 300-filing limit.

Nothing extra. A charity or CASC filing with CT600E is charged at the standard trading company price of £25 per filing — the same as any other CT600 with accounts.

If you file for several charities, the accountant membership at £250 a year covers up to 100 company filings in a 12-month period, charity filings included. There is no separate charity module, no per-supplementary-page fee, and no upgrade to unlock CT600E.

• Ticking E20 when some income is not exempt. If any income falls outside the exemptions, it is E25 and a completed main computation. E20 is a statement that everything is exempt and applied for charitable purposes.
• Double counting under E25. Exempt income belongs on CT600E only. Putting it in the main CT600 income boxes as well creates a tax liability out of thin air.
• Assuming the CASC caps work on the excess. They do not. Breach the cap and the entire amount of that income is taxable.
• Expecting WeFile to file the accounts at Companies House. For charities it will not, by design. Plan for a separate accounts filing.
• Entering E100 with nothing in E60. HMRC rule 9612 will reject that pairing; WeFile warns you first.
• Leaving E15 untricked because there was no income. A charity with no income or gains still ticks E15 to claim exemption.
• Forgetting that the trustee declaration on CT600E is not the main form declaration. If you want the main CT600 declaration to read "Trustee" rather than defaulting to "Director", set the declarant status on the credentials step as well.

Do we have to file a CT600 if we are a charity with no taxable income?

If HMRC has issued a notice to deliver, yes. You file the CT600 with CT600E attached, tick E15, and — assuming everything is exempt — tick E20 for a nil return.

Can WeFile file our charity accounts to Companies House?

No. Charity accounts under FRS 102 and the Charities SORP cannot be filed electronically through WeFile, so the Companies House leg is disabled for charity filings and those accounts must be filed separately. Everything on the HMRC side is filed for you.

Do we need to attach our accounts to the HMRC submission?

It is optional in WeFile. Upload a PDF of your accounts and we attach it with the appropriate reason code; leave it out and we generate and attach an explanation letter instead. Both are accepted routes.

We are a CASC, not a charity. Is the page different?

Slightly. Boxes E10, E180 and E185 are charity-only and are hidden for CASCs, box 4 is set to 6, and the wizard reminds you about the trading and property income caps.

Our year end changed and the period is 15 months. What happens?

It becomes two returns. You enter CT600E figures for each sub-period, the exemption claim goes on both, and legacy rows are allocated to the right return by date.

Can a charity filing also include CT600A?

Not in the wizard — we keep the two mutually exclusive as a product decision. The API tolerates both for backward compatibility, and that behaviour is documented.

What if we get the exemption claim wrong after HMRC has accepted the return?

Charity status is locked once the return is accepted. The route is an amended return, which WeFile supports.

CT600E has a reputation for being fiddly, and the reputation is earned: five separate blocks of boxes, a donor-level table, per-sub-period figures on a long period, gateway rules that surface as unhelpful error codes, and an accounts position that differs from every other kind of company.

WeFile takes the mechanical parts off your desk — the totals, the box 115 and box 4 flags, the E88 mirroring, the sub-period split, the validation rules, the NoAccountsReason routing, the PDFs — and is explicit about the one part it cannot do for you, so you can plan around it.

Sign in to WeFile and start a filing, tick the charity or CASC box on step 1, and the Charity step will be waiting for you. If you would like to see the full list of CT600 boxes we support before you commit, it is on our home page, and the developer documentation lives at /api-docs.