Who this covers, and how the figures are checked
Who this is for
Working out whether a client gift is deductible usually falls to whoever runs the office: the owner-manager, the office manager, or the PA who has been handed the job with no handover from last year. You know roughly what corporation tax and VAT are, but you have probably not had reason to open HMRC's Business Income Manual before now. This page exists so you can check the rule against the gift you are actually planning.
Why the same £50 figure appears twice
Client gift deductibility runs on two separate tests that happen to share a number. Corporation tax asks whether the gift meets HMRC's conditions for an allowable advertising gift, one of which is a £50 per recipient per year limit. VAT asks a different question over a different period, under the twelve-month rule in VAT Notice 700/7. A gift can pass one test and fail the other, so both are worked through here.
Where the figures come from
Every tax threshold on this page is tied to the HMRC manual page it came from and the tax year it belongs to, because a figure without both stops being reliable the moment the Budget changes it. Supplier minimum orders elsewhere on the site carry the date they were read from the supplier's own page, for the same reason. Nothing here is sold, stocked, or supplied by this site: the about page sets out that sourcing approach in full, and how to flag a figure that has moved on.
Four conditions, checked together
An allowable advertising gift has to meet all four of HMRC's conditions at once. Missing one is enough to fail the test, whatever the other three look like.
One number, two questions
The £50 corporation tax limit and the VAT twelve-month rule both use £50, but they are not asking the same thing. Both are set out side by side so neither gets mistaken for the other.
No stake in the gift itself
This site does not sell or supply anything, so the figures here are about the rule.