Construction Industry Scheme (CIS) Explained for 2026
A plain-English guide to the Construction Industry Scheme: who counts as contractor or subcontractor, registration, verification, the 20/30/gross rates, and records.
The Construction Industry Scheme (CIS) is an HMRC scheme where contractors deduct money from a subcontractor's labour payments and pass it to HMRC as advance payments toward that subcontractor's tax and National Insurance. This overview explains who counts as a contractor and who counts as a subcontractor, how registration and verification work, and what the 20 percent, 30 percent, and gross payment rates mean, all applied to labour rather than materials or VAT.
It also covers the records you must keep and how CIS differs from IR35 and PAYE. KaamCam is not CIS-filing software, but at 12 dollars a month per user (about 9 pounds) it produces invoices that clearly separate labour from materials and stores every invoice, payment, and job photo per customer, the clean records CIS runs on..