UK Rap Award: application guidance

To apply you must:

• Have a track record of making 40% of your income from music for the past two years or longer. Exceptions apply for musicians with a long-term health condition and/​or disability that impacts your ability to earn.
• Be aged 18 or over, living in the UK, with the right to live and work in the UK and with a UK bank account
• Not have more than £10,000 savings or access to other capital that could fund your planned activity

Please check that you are eligible to apply before starting your application.

Beyond this, to receive this award you must:

• Be making music in an UK Rap genre
• Be willing to commit to the activities and key dates within the programme 
• Be able to deliver your supported activities within 12 months
• Have control over one or more aspects of your career, i.e., self-managing, self-releasing or self-producing 

The UK Rap Award supports musicians working within the UK Rap genre, including its many sub-genres and associated creative roles.

• Rap
• Grime
• Drill
• Afroswing
• Hip-Hop
• Trap / Trapwave
• Road Rap
• Trip Hop
• Britcore
• Horrorcore

This award is also open to new or emerging sub-genres in UK Rap that may not be listed above.

Please note we will consider applications from producers and MCs alongside rappers.

If you’re unsure where your work fits, we still encourage you to apply if you feel it clearly sits within the wider rap genre. 

This programme is to support individual musicians. If multiple members of a group or collective meet the criteria you can each apply, though we will assess each application individually, only fund the same project once, and are highly unlikely to fund multiple projects from the same group within 12 months of each other. 

You can use the grant funding towards projects delivered in a group or collective, providing you can show the difference they’ll make to your personal career. 

No. You can only apply for, and take part in, one creative and career service at a time. 

This means that if you are awaiting the outcome of another career development application you will not be eligible to make any further applications. 

This also means that if you are receiving support from another career development award or service you will not be able to apply for any other career development support until the other support has ended. This would usually be when you have completed your activity and submitted a final report. 

Competition for our support is very high, so it’s worth knowing what we are looking for in an application to give yourself the best chance.

We will prioritise applications based on:

• Timing and urgency: you’re at a pivotal moment in your career when our support could really help you move forward, rather than seeking support for a project you could do at any time
• Network building: you’re already working collaboratively and building the right connections for your career, and you have clear goals for the networks you want to build through this support
• Career focussed: you can tell us very clear music career goals and how joining this programme at this time will help you achieve them.
• Track record: you can show consistent dedication to your music over time 

When you make an application, we will need you to provide us with details of a referee, as well as 3 months of your most recent bank statements from all your current and savings accounts.

We use these statements to verify that:

• you are earning at least 40% of your income from music,
• you are within our household income threshold, and
• you do not have any ineligible capital.

Full eligibility details here. 

You will have 12 months to spend the grant.

Please note, the first two months of the award will be focused on business advice and peer engagement opportunities, so you will not receive your financial support immediately (see below). 

Applications close at 5pm on 7 January 2026 and we will share our decisions with applicants in March 2026. 

We cannot fast track applications or provide updates on when you will hear whether you have been successful.

Please note, if you don’t provide all required information for us to assess your eligibility or application we will pause your application while we wait for more information from you and this will slow down the process. 

This support is for your long-term career development and the grant is only one part of it.

We have found that accessing some guidance before starting a project enables musicians to make best use of their financial support, so we aim to release funding once you have undertaken at least one and a half hours of our business advice sessions. This is approximately 8 weeks from when we have approved your support. 

We appreciate the time and effort that goes into every application. Due to high demand, we generally can only support, at most, one in five musicians who apply to us.  As a charity we rely on donations from our supporters and have to prioritise use of their funds where we believe we can best meet our charitable purposes to prevent and relieve poverty amongst professional musicians and deliver most impact by supporting working musicians to keep making music. Regrettably we don’t have the resources to support more of the musicians who apply to us. 

Additionally, with a small team, we are not able to provide individual feedback or enter into any correspondence about decisions on applications for support. We provide guidance and tips on what makes a strong application, which we encourage all applicants to read in detail during the application process. 

We have previously been able to provide feedback but with an increase in complex health and financial support cases we are no longer able to provide this service.