The threshold has not always sat at £90,000. It rose from £85,000 on 1 April 2024, the first increase in several years, with the deregistration threshold moving in step from £83,000 to £88,000. For a sector built on small operators, that gap between registering and deregistering matters: a maker whose turnover dips just under £88,000 the following year can apply to come back out of the VAT system rather than staying registered indefinitely.

How do you know when it's time to register?

HMRC applies two tests, and either one can trigger the obligation. The first looks backwards: if your total taxable turnover for the last 12 months goes over £90,000, you must register. The second looks forwards: if you expect your turnover to go over £90,000 in the next 30 days alone — a sudden bulk commission, say, or a viral order spike — you must register by the end of that 30-day window, with your effective registration date set to the day you first realised the threshold would be breached, not the day it actually was.

Registration itself has to happen within 30 days of the month-end in which you crossed the threshold, and the effective date of registration becomes the first day of the second month after that. It is a rolling calculation, not a tax-year one, so a maker needs to be checking turnover on a genuinely ongoing basis rather than once a year at accounts time.

What happens if you miss the deadline?

Registering late does not make the liability disappear. If you register late, you must pay VAT on any sales you've made since the date you should have registered, and HMRC can also charge a penalty, scaled to how much is owed and how late the registration was. Because the two tests apply independently, the safest habit for a growing maker business is to track turnover monthly rather than relying on an annual tally.

Registration is not only for businesses forced over the line. You can choose to register for VAT even if your turnover is less than £90,000, known as voluntary registration — a route some makers take so they can reclaim VAT on materials, kiln fuel, packaging or studio equipment, in exchange for charging VAT on what they sell.

Why does this matter more for craft businesses specifically?

The sector this threshold lands on is overwhelmingly small-scale. Craft sales are worth £3 billion to the UK economy, according to the Crafts Council, and the sector itself is dominated by micro enterprises and sole practitioners — precisely the kind of business most likely to tip over £90,000 gradually, through steady growth, rather than all at once. The Crafts Council also flags a separate wrinkle for makers selling through online marketplaces: for lower-value goods sold to customers abroad, it is often the marketplace itself, not the maker, that collects VAT at the point of sale under current online marketplace rules — a distinct system from the UK domestic registration threshold, and one worth checking against current guidance for the specific country a piece is shipping to.

FAQ

• What is the current VAT registration threshold? £90,000 of taxable turnover in a rolling 12-month period. It rose from £85,000 on 1 April 2024, alongside a deregistration threshold of £88,000, up from £83,000.
• Does it matter whether I sell online, at fairs, or both? No — HMRC's threshold counts total taxable turnover from all trading, so sales made in person at a market or fair count towards the same £90,000 figure as online sales.
• What happens if I register for VAT late? You still owe VAT on everything sold since the date you should have registered, and HMRC may add a penalty based on the amount owed and how late the registration was.
• Can I register before I reach £90,000? Yes. Voluntary registration is available below the threshold, and some makers use it to reclaim VAT on materials and equipment.

For the exact rules that apply to a specific business — including how taxable turnover is calculated and what counts as an exempt sale — HMRC's own VAT registration guidance is the definitive reference, alongside sector-specific support from bodies like the Crafts Council's business resources for makers weighing up growth against the paperwork that comes with it.

What is the £1,000 trading allowance?

Every UK individual can earn up to £1,000 a year from occasional trading — selling crafts included — without telling HMRC or registering for anything, per the government's trading allowance guidance. Below the threshold, the income is simply tax-free. The moment gross trading income — takings, not profit — exceeds £1,000 in a tax year, two things change: registration becomes due, and the choice arises of claiming the £1,000 allowance as flat expenses or deducting real costs instead. For makers buying clay, wool and kiln electricity, real costs usually beat the flat allowance, which is why the choice matters.

When do you have to register — and by when?

Registration for self-assessment as a sole trader is due by the 5 October following the end of the tax year in which your trading began or your income crossed the threshold. Cross £1,000 in, say, the 2025-26 tax year and HMRC expects you registered by 5 October 2026, with the first tax return covering that year due the following January. Registering is free and done online through GOV.UK; a Unique Taxpayer Reference arrives by post, and thereafter returns are filed annually — by 31 January for online filings, with payments on account in January and July for many new traders.

What records does a maker actually need?

• A log of takings — date, amount, channel: fair, shop, online marketplace.
• Receipts and invoices for materials, tools, studio costs, fees, postage and insurance.
• Mileage or travel records for fairs and stockists.
• A separate bank account, even a basic one, so trading money stops hiding among groceries.

The discipline is duller than the making and more valuable than it looks: the same records price your work honestly, fill in grant applications convincingly and turn January from an archaeology project into an afternoon.

What else changes as the business grows?

Two signposts matter as turnover climbs. National Insurance contributions apply to self-employment profits above small thresholds, collected through self-assessment. And if taxable turnover approaches £90,000, VAT registration becomes mandatory — a change significant enough to deserve its own planning rather than a paragraph here. Between those poles, most maker businesses run happily as sole traders, with business bank accounts, simple software and, at the point where the numbers stop being simple, an accountant who likes creative businesses — money well spent precisely once a year.

The shortlist, announced in April 2026, put five museums in England forward: alongside The Box were the National Gallery in London — recognised for its NG200 programme, the transformed Sainsbury Wing and new learning spaces — and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, with the remaining finalists spanning the regions. The Art Fund credits the prize to museums demonstrating unexpected, innovative and forward-thinking practice, per the charity's published criteria.

For readers of a craft magazine, The Box's win lands with particular weight. Since opening in 2020 in Plymouth's former museum and library buildings, it has made the city's making history central — permanent galleries built around the figureheads once carried by Royal Navy warships, alongside programmes that treat regional craft, industry and memory as one story. A regional museum holding a national prize argues that the institutions collecting makers' work are not only in capital cities — a point regional museum advocacy and museum funding coverage have pressed for years.

The prize money is directed by winners into future programmes rather than trophies, and the Art Fund publishes the judges' citations on its website each year. Museum of the Year will return in twelve months; for now the banner is flying in Plymouth, Britain's Ocean City.

How does print numbering actually work?

The convention is stable across lithography, etching, screen print, linocut and digital editions. Below the image, usually in pencil on the left, sits the impression number over the edition size — 7/50. On the right, the title and the artist's signature. Around the numbered edition sit the exceptions, marked with initials: AP for artist's proofs, traditionally up to about ten per cent of the edition and the artist's own; PP for printer's proofs, courtesy of the press; HC — hors commerce — kept from sale, often for archives or gifts; and BAT — bon à tirer, the approved reference impression the edition is matched to. The edition proper is printed once, in one campaign, and the matrix is then cancelled — scratched, defaced or archived with proof — so the promise of finitude holds.

How do you choose an edition size?

Match the size to demand you can evidence, not demand you hope for. A smaller edition supports a higher price and suits work from a hand-cut block, where every impression is pulled by hand; a larger edition suits screen print runs where the set-up cost is amortised across more impressions. Established practice runs from micro-editions of ten or fewer to open editions — unnumbered, cheaper, sold indefinitely — for greeting-card-scale output. The mistake to avoid is shrinking an edition after it has sold slowly and reissuing the image: the second promise cannot be made to the first set of buyers, a principle collections from museum print rooms to open-access study collections document impression by impression.

How does pricing work across an edition?

The ladder is oldest practice and still the soundest: price rises as the edition sells, because the remaining impressions get scarcer. A common pattern holds the first third at the opening price, raises the middle third, and prices the final third at or near the top — published plainly on the listing, so buyers understand that waiting has a cost. Artist's proofs, being few, sit at or above the edition's top price. Open editions and smaller formats price at entry level, doing the work of letting a new buyer start collecting you.

The final piece is documentation: a simple record of every impression — number, buyer, date, price — kept with the cancelled matrix or the file. Editions outlive studio moves and memory, and the record is what lets a printmaker answer, twenty years on, which impression went where: the quiet backbone of the whole pencil-written contract.

What is the Artist's Resale Right?

The right gives artists — and, since the phased extensions completed in 2014, their heirs for seventy years after death — a royalty each time a work resells through an art market professional: auction houses, galleries and dealers. It applies when the sale price reaches €1,000, and the royalty follows a sliding scale set in law: 4 per cent on the portion of price up to €50,000, stepping down through 3, 1, 0.5 and 0.25 per cent above that, with a total cap of €12,500 per sale. Private sales between individuals do not attract it; the professionals are the collection point because they are the record-keepers.

In the UK, collecting societies — DACS foremost among them — administer the right, matching sale records to artists and distributing royalties, typically taking an administrative commission for the service. An artist registers with a collecting society rather than chasing auctioneers individually, an arrangement UK intellectual property guidance supports with published explanations of the right.

Who actually pays, and when?

The seller pays, deducted at source by the auction house or dealer conducting the sale. The professional must withhold the royalty, report the qualifying sale to the collecting society and pass the money on; failing to do so is a breach of the regulations, not a courtesy skipped. For living artists, payments are identified from sale records and forwarded; for deceased artists within the seventy-year window, heirs or their estates receive them.

What does the right mean for craft makers?

Most craft work resells below the €1,000 threshold, so for many makers the right is theoretical — until it is not. Ceramics and studio glass by named makers have crossed the threshold at auction for years, and as secondary markets for leading ceramicists deepen, the right increasingly touches makers who thought of themselves as outside the art market entirely. The practical steps are simple: keep dated records of your works and buyers, register with a collecting society so qualifying sales can be matched to you, and let buyers know that future resale may carry the royalty — a disclosure that costs nothing and reads, correctly, as a mark of work expected to hold value.

The deeper point the right encodes is one makers already know: the object keeps living after the first sale, and the law has decided the hands that made it stay party to that life, in a small percentage, for up to seventy years.

Himid, born in Zanzibar in 1954 and long based in the north-west of England where she has taught at the University of Central Lancashire, won the Turner Prize in 2017, the first Black woman to receive it. Across four decades her work — paintings, cut-out figures, installations, sound — has placed Black lives and histories at the centre of British art rather than its margins, and the Biennale commission is in part a recognition of how thoroughly that project has reshaped the field. The Guardian's review of 5 May 2026 described her pavilion as painting an awkward, tense, uncomfortable portrait of the nation — high praise in Himid's language of confrontation and care.

For makers and material-minded artists, the pavilion is worth watching closely: Himid's practice has always been unafraid of the handmade — painted ceramics, found objects, cut-out wood — and the Biennale context tends to foreground the labour behind such work for an international audience, an attention Himid's career coverage has tracked since well before Venice.

The Biennale runs through the autumn, and British Council programming around the pavilion typically includes talks and interpretation resources online for those who cannot travel. Britain's presence in Venice changes hands only every two years; in 2026 it belongs to a painter who has spent a career insisting that the domestic, the handmade and the historical are one conversation.

How do you pack ceramics so they survive?

Double-boxing is the non-negotiable core. The piece is wrapped individually — each cup, each lid, each handle wrapped on its own in bubble wrap or tissue and taped — then packed inside a smaller inner box with cushioning material on all sides, roughly five centimetres of it. That inner box then floats inside a larger outer box on another five centimetres of cushioning, so no part of the work can touch an outer wall. Void fill — screwed-up kraft paper, air pillows — immobilises everything; the shake test is universal: if it rattles, it breaks.

Two rules finish the method. Heavy items go in smaller boxes, because a 15-kilogram box of mugs is dropped, not carried. And pairs are separated: a bowl nested inside a bowl needs a layer between them, or the journey does the trimming for you.

How should prints and works on paper travel?

Flat is safest for small works: print sandwiched between two stiff boards slightly larger than the sheet, then in a board-backed envelope marked do not bend. Larger editions travel rolled around a generous diameter — a wider roll means gentler curvature — inside a rigid tube with tissue protecting the printed surface, and flanges or end-padding stopping the work from shifting. Never roll thickly applied or fragile media; pastel and charcoal surfaces prefer flat travel with glassine interleaving, a convention print shops have held for decades.

What about compensation when it still goes wrong?

Carrier compensation schemes exist but pay out only within their published limits and claiming requires evidence — photographs, receipts, proof of posting — which is why studios photograph every finished piece and its packed box before dispatch, a habit consumer postal guidance on GOV.UK frames from the buyer's side. Insurance for higher-value work is sold separately and priced on declared value; read the exclusions, because packing to the carrier's own stated standard is usually a condition of the payout. And a broken-piece policy, stated plainly on your shop page — replacement or refund, and how quickly — costs nothing and buys more customer goodwill than any claim form.

The last practice is the quietest: keep a breakage log. Studios that note what broke and how it was packed stop repeating the same loss, and after a season the log, not folklore, sets the packing standard for every new shape that leaves the bench.

Which costs go on the page before you set off?

The stall fee is the visible layer: commonly £30 to £60 for small local fairs, £150 to £400 and beyond for juried urban events in 2025. Travel sits beside it — fuel or rail fares, and for distant fairs, a night's accommodation that can quietly exceed the fee itself. Stock is the third layer and the one most often forgotten: what you sell, you must replace, so the cost of materials and making for everything that left the table belongs to the fair's account, not to next month's.

Selling costs finish the list: card reader fees — typically under 3 per cent per transaction in the UK — packaging handed out on the day, and the insurance many fairs require before you trade. Add a float of change, a cash box and something to eat, because a nine-hour day on your feet is a cost too.

How do you work out whether a fair paid?

Take a worked example. A juried fair charges a £180 stall, £40 of fuel, and you take £900 on the day. Card fees run near £25 on £850 of card takings, and the stock sold carried about £280 of material and making cost. The account reads: £900 takings minus £525 of costs equals £375 — before a single hour is priced, from the eight hours of making replaced to the two days of packing, travel and standing. Priced even at the UK's April 2025 National Living Wage of £12.21, the hours alone claim around £300, which reframes the day as break-even-plus, an outcome market trader reporting would recognise instantly.

That reframe is the point. Break-even-plus on a new fair is a good result — it bought you a day of customer conversations, wholesale enquiries and market research. The failure is not modest profit; it is not knowing the number at all.

How do traders decide to go back?

Two seasons of data, the same discipline fair veterans apply everywhere. Track takings, costs and hours per event in one place, then sort the list. Fairs that clear costs comfortably and reliably earn a return slot and your best stock; middling ones get a cheaper format — shared stall, smaller range; the bottom of the table gets a polite decline, however friendly the organiser. The makers who last treat their fair calendar like a shopkeeper treats shelf space: finite, measured and ruthlessly assigned to what sells.

Which fees does Etsy charge on every sale?

Four charges recur. The listing fee — $0.20, around 16p — is paid per item or quantity listed and renews after four months or on sale. The transaction fee is 6.5 per cent of the total, and it includes what the buyer pays for postage, a detail that surprises new sellers on every heavy parcel. Payment processing in the UK typically adds around 4 per cent plus 20p per order. And there is a payment account fee in some regions — small, but real — applied to each transaction.

On a £60 mug order with £5 postage, the arithmetic looks like this: roughly 16p listing, £4.23 transaction on the £65 total, and about £2.80 processing — around £7.20 in all, or just over 11 per cent before postage costs, packaging and your clay. On a £20 card it is proportionally heavier, because fixed per-order charges bite hardest on small baskets. art news coverage.

What is Offsite Ads and why is it unavoidable?

Offsite Ads is Etsy's external advertising programme, and above a sales threshold participation is compulsory. Sellers who have made $10,000 or more in the previous twelve months pay a 12 per cent fee on orders the programme attributes to its ads; below that threshold the programme is optional and takes 15 per cent on attributed sales. The fee applies only when Etsy's systems credit the ad with the order — but sellers cannot opt out above the threshold, so mature shops must treat 12 per cent as a live cost on part of their turnover. Onsite Ads, which promote listings inside Etsy, remain optional at 12 to 15 per cent depending on settings.

How do makers price around all this?

The working methods are unglamorous. Price in whole pounds with the fee stack already absorbed, so a mug that must net £22 after fees lists at £26. Raise free-shipping thresholds to keep postage out of the transaction fee where possible. Watch the ad dashboard monthly — attributed sales are listed there — and factor them into the autumn quarter, when marketplace advertising intensifies ahead of Christmas, a season e-commerce reporting covers closely each year.

Finally, remember what the fees buy: a storefront with traffic, checkout and trust that would cost real money to rebuild alone. The healthiest shops treat Etsy as one channel among several — fairs, stockists, a simple own-website shop — so no single fee schedule ever holds the whole business hostage.

What should a handmade price actually cover?

A price needs to carry more than the obvious outlay. Materials are the visible part: clay, wool, paper, ink, packaging and the card-reader fee. The invisible part is bigger — studio rent, tool replacement, kiln electricity, insurance, postage failures, the fair you drove five hours to attend, and every message answered after midnight. Working makers commonly treat overheads as a percentage uplift on materials and labour rather than tracking each cost individually, which keeps the maths possible without an accountant.

Time is the cost makers forget first. Pattern cutting, test pieces, photographing stock, writing listings and packing orders all belong in the price of the piece in front of the buyer. A useful habit from working studios: log hours per batch, not per item, then divide. A run of ten mugs shares one wedging, one glaze test and one photo session.

Which pricing formula holds up?

Two formulas dominate craft pricing, and both work when used honestly. The first is materials multiplied by a factor — commonly three or four — with the multiplier standing in for labour and overheads. It survives scrutiny only when your materials are the dominant cost and your process is quick; a silk-and-gold-thread embroidered piece priced this way can work, a hand-thrown mug cannot.

The second is the hourly build: materials + (hours × hourly rate) + overhead percentage. It is slower but defensible, because you can show a buyer or a grant panel exactly where the number comes from. Say £6 of stoneware clay and glaze, one hour at your rate, and a 20 per cent overhead uplift on the subtotal — whatever the arithmetic produces is the price, rounded honestly. If the result feels unsellable, the answer is a cheaper process, a smaller batch or a different market, never a silent wage cut.

What does the law say your hour is worth?

The UK's National Living Wage sets the legal floor for workers aged 21 and over, and it rose to £12.21 an hour in April 2025, per the published government rates. If your formula produces an effective hourly rate below that floor, the price is not clever — it is a subsidy from you to the buyer. Makers who teach, demonstrate or take commissions tend to price those hours at least at the statutory rate, and their bench hours higher, because skill is the product being bought.

Should you raise prices on existing work?

Yes, when costs move. Clay, wool and shipping have all risen since 2021, and a price list set two years ago is probably losing money now. The standard practice is an annual review: recompute materials, check your effective hourly rate, and move prices in one clear step rather than drifting upward in odd increments. Long-time buyers handle an honest increase better than a maker who disappears because the numbers stopped working.

None of this prices the poetry of a piece — its provenance, its maker's name, the decade of skill behind it. But poetry is the layer on top of the arithmetic, not a replacement for it. Start from a number you can defend, then let the work do the persuading, a distinction writing on craft economies returns to each season.

Coordinating is no ceremonial role. Gander leads the hanging committee of Royal Academicians — the Royal Academy named Eileen Cooper, Michael Craig-Martin, Oona Grimes, Katherine Jones and Goshka Macuga among his fellow selectors — deciding how thousands of works by members of the public sit beside those of established artists, salon-style, wall to wall.

For makers and illustrators, the announcement matters for one structural reason: anyone can enter. The Summer Exhibition has long hung watercolours by unknown hands next to work by Royal Academicians, and entries for the 2026 edition open through the Royal Academy's website in the months before the show. Accepted works are offered for sale, with proceeds split between the artist and the Royal Academy's charitable work, per the institution's published arrangements for past editions.

The open-submission tradition, which the programme has kept since 1769, is the reason crafts-adjacent artists watch the coordinator choice so closely — each one redraws the balance between painting, print, architecture and object-making. Gander's record of treating objects as ideas suggests a year when made things will be read closely, an outlook coverage of the Summer Exhibition's open tradition has long celebrated.