Is the £16,960 Personal Allowance Real? What the Headline Leaves Out

A headline circulating in September 2026 says HMRC has increased the tax-free Personal Allowance to “a bumper £16,960 with 1 condition”. People are searching the phrase to find out whether it is true.

The short answer: the arithmetic is real, the figure is last year’s, and it is not one condition.

Where £16,960 comes from

The number is three separate allowances added together:

Component	Amount	Who gets it
Personal Allowance	£12,570	Almost everyone
Blind Person’s Allowance	£3,130 in 2025/26	Certified severely sight impaired
Marriage Allowance transferred in	£1,260	Basic-rate taxpayer with a low-earning spouse
Total	£16,960

That adds up. It is also a 2025/26 figure. Blind Person’s Allowance rose to £3,250 for 2026/27, so the current-year version of the same stack is:

£12,570 + £3,250 + £1,260 = £17,080

HMRC has not increased anything

The framing is the part worth correcting. The Personal Allowance is £12,570 and has been frozen since April 2021; the Autumn Budget 2025 extended that freeze to April 2031. Nothing about it went up.

Blind Person’s Allowance and Marriage Allowance are not new either. Both have existed for years and neither is a change in policy. Blind Person’s Allowance is uprated most years, and that single £120 increase is the only thing that moved.

It is four conditions, not one

To reach £17,080 every one of these has to be true at the same time:

1. You are certified severely sight impaired or blind. In England and Wales GOV.UK requires both that you are registered with your local council as blind or severely sight impaired and that you hold a certificate saying so, or a similar document from your doctor. In Scotland and Northern Ireland the test is different: you qualify if you “cannot do work that eyesight is essential for”.
2. You have a spouse or civil partner. Marriage Allowance is not available to unmarried couples, however long they have lived together.
3. That partner earns under £12,570 and gives up £1,260 of their own allowance. Their allowance drops to £11,310. If they later start earning, this can push them into paying tax they would not otherwise have paid.
4. You are a basic-rate taxpayer. Marriage Allowance requires the recipient’s income to be between £12,571 and £50,270, or between £12,571 and £43,662 in Scotland.

Fail any one of those and the £17,080 figure does not apply to you.

What it is actually worth

Marriage Allowance is not a straight increase in your allowance. GOV.UK describes the receiving partner as getting “a reduction of £1,260 on their taxable income”, worth up to £252 a year in tax at the basic rate. In the headline’s scenario that recipient is you. The effect on a basic-rate taxpayer is the same as £1,260 more tax-free income, which is why adding it to the total is fair, but it is capped at £252 and it does not scale with a higher rate of tax.

Blind Person’s Allowance is different: it genuinely increases your Personal Allowance. Because it is an allowance rather than a fixed credit, it saves tax at whatever your marginal rate is: £650 for a 20% basic-rate taxpayer in 2026/27, and more or less than that for a Scottish taxpayer, whose rates run from 19% to 48%.

If you are not married

Blind Person’s Allowance stands on its own. For 2026/27 that gives you:

£12,570 + £3,250 = £15,820 of tax-free income

No partner, no transfer, no fourth condition.

The part the headline misses

Blind Person’s Allowance is itself transferable. If your income is too low to use all of it, you can pass the unused part to your spouse or civil partner. GOV.UK is explicit that this works “whether or not your spouse or civil partner is blind”. You need to be married or in a civil partnership and living together, though the rules allow for living apart because of illness, age, work, a forces posting, prison or education. For a couple where one partner has little or no income, that is often worth more than chasing the headline figure, and it runs in the opposite direction to Marriage Allowance.

How to claim

GOV.UK says simply to contact HMRC to claim Blind Person’s Allowance, and gives a phone number for it. Marriage Allowance is claimed online by the partner who is giving allowance away, not the one receiving it. GOV.UK says a claim can be backdated to 6 April 2022, the 2022 to 2023 tax year, for any year you were eligible.

Read next

The two allowances behind the headline each have their own guide, with the detail this page compresses: Blind Person’s Allowance 2026/27 and Marriage Allowance 2026/27.