ISA allowance 2026/27: how the £20,000 splits

What is the ISA allowance for 2026/27?

£20,000. That is the total amount you can subscribe across all your adult ISAs in the 2026/27 tax year, whatever mix of account types you choose. It has stayed at £20,000 since 2017/18, and it is not changing for 2026/27 or, in overall terms, for 2027/28 either.

How the £20,000 splits across ISA types

You choose the mix. gov.uk’s own example shows how flexible this can be: £10,000 in one Cash ISA, £3,000 in another Cash ISA, and £7,000 in a Stocks and Shares ISA, all in the same tax year, adding up to the full £20,000. You could just as easily put the whole £20,000 into one Cash ISA, split it evenly across cash and Stocks and Shares, or add an Innovative Finance ISA into the mix. The only hard limits are the £20,000 total, and, since 6 April 2024, being able to pay into more than one ISA of the same type in a year rather than being restricted to just one.

An Innovative Finance ISA is the fourth type, less commonly used than the other three. It can hold peer-to-peer loans, crowdfunding debentures, certain funds that cannot sit inside a Stocks and Shares ISA because of their notice or redemption period, and cryptoasset exchange-traded notes. It shares the same overall £20,000 allowance as everything else.

Jamal is 29 and wants to use his full £20,000 allowance for 2026/27. He puts £8,000 into a Cash ISA, £4,000 into a Lifetime ISA to get the government bonus toward a first home, and the remaining £8,000 into a Stocks and Shares ISA. That adds up to exactly £20,000, split across three of the four ISA types in one tax year, which is entirely normal.

The Lifetime ISA’s £4,000 limit

A Lifetime ISA is one of the four adult ISA types, and it can hold either cash or investments. It has its own annual limit of £4,000, on top of which the government adds a 25% bonus, up to £1,000 a year. That £4,000 sits inside your overall £20,000, not alongside it. Subscribe the full £4,000 to a Lifetime ISA and you have £16,000 left across your other ISAs that year. A Lifetime ISA must be opened before your 40th birthday, and you can keep contributing to it, and earning the bonus, up to age 50.

Separately, HM Treasury has been consulting on a First Time Buyer ISA intended to eventually replace the Lifetime ISA for new savers. That consultation closed on 18 August 2026 with no launch date confirmed by gov.uk, and existing Lifetime ISAs continue unchanged in the meantime.

The Junior ISA’s separate £9,000 limit

A Junior ISA is a different allowance altogether. For 2026/27, up to £9,000 a year can be paid into a Junior ISA on behalf of a child under 18, and this has no connection to any adult’s own £20,000 allowance. A parent can use their full personal allowance and still contribute to a Junior ISA in the same tax year. A child can hold one cash Junior ISA and one Stocks and Shares Junior ISA at a time, and takes control of managing the account at 16, though the money itself cannot be withdrawn until they turn 18.

What counts towards your allowance, and what doesn’t

New money you subscribe during the tax year counts. Interest earned inside a Cash ISA, and growth or dividends earned inside a Stocks and Shares ISA, do not count again; that value simply grows tax-free within the wrapper. Transfers are the other thing that does not use up fresh allowance: moving money you saved in a previous tax year from one provider to another, done as an official transfer rather than a withdrawal, does not count against this year’s £20,000.

For example, if you transfer a Cash ISA holding £30,000, built up over ten years, to a new provider in the middle of 2026/27, none of that £30,000 counts against your £20,000 allowance for the year. Only fresh money you subscribe on top of it, in either the old account before the transfer or the new one after, uses up that year’s allowance.

Flexible ISAs

Some ISAs, Cash ISAs in particular, offer flexibility as an optional feature. If yours is flexible, you can withdraw money and pay it back in during the same tax year without that repayment counting against your allowance a second time. Not every ISA offers this, so check with your own provider rather than assuming it applies.

What changes from 2027/28

The £20,000 total is not going anywhere. What changes, from 6 April 2027, is that anyone 64 or under at the end of the tax year can put at most £12,000 of it into a Cash ISA; the rest has to go into a Stocks and Shares ISA, an Innovative Finance ISA, or a Lifetime ISA if they want to use the full £20,000. Anyone 65 or over at the end of the relevant tax year keeps the full £20,000 available for cash. See the Cash ISA limit from 2027 for the full detail.