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Apply for benefits and financial support

Crisis grant

Crisis grants from the Scottish Welfare Fund can help if you have an emergency or disaster and need to pay for short-term living costs. If you get a crisis grant from the Scottish Welfare Fund, it will not affect your right to get any other benefits.

A crisis grant would be used to avoid serious damage or a serious risk to the health and safety of you or your family. Crisis grants are intended to meet one-off needs and do not provide an alternative source of regular income.

How to qualify

A crisis grant may help if:

  • you're facing a disaster, for example a fire or flood
  • you're facing an emergency, for example an unexpected expense you had not budgeted for, or being stranded away from home without any way to get back
  • you need help to keep you and your family safe from harm as a result of costs you have because of the disaster or emergency

You must be aged 16 or over, have a low income or get benefits and not have access to any other appropriate source of financial help.

What a crisis grant may pay for

The help you may receive will depend on the difficulties you're facing and the likely impact to you or your family. You may get money or another form of support such as a voucher, fuel card or furniture.

We only provide items that are of a high priority need to your or your family. This applies if:

  • your need is assessed to be immediate and severe
  • you or your family are assessed as highly vulnerable
  • what you have asked for will have a substantial or immediate ongoing impact in resolving or improving your health and wellbeing
  • there will be significant adverse consequences if the item is not provided

How to apply

Apply for a crisis grant

You can also check if you qualify, or return to a partially completed application.

If you do not want to apply online you can:

If you need help applying you can ask us to call you:

After you apply

It normally takes 1 working day to process an application, as long as you've given us all the information we need. We'll call you when we have started to look at your application.

We'll write to you when we've made a decision. If you are successful we'll call you to explain what happens next. 

To track the progress of a completed application:

If you do not qualify

You can ask for a review if you're not happy with the decision about your application.