Your distribution questions answered
Next week, we will pay 31,569 members their share of £12,427,914. Get answers to your most pressing questions about our latest distribution.
How will I know if I’m being paid?
Payments aren’t guaranteed and if you haven’t received an email from us about your statement by 2 October, and there is no statement alert in your online account, you haven’t been paid this time. The money we pay out in September is predominantly for retransmissions of audiovisual work, photocopying of books in the education and government sectors, and payments for visual contributions. This is the smaller of the two distributions, and most members only receive a payment in March. If you are owed royalties for other types of work, you can expect payment in our next distribution in March 2027.
Payments to UK bank accounts should arrive on or around Wednesday 30 September. However, payments to international bank accounts may take longer to arrive. The amount of time taken depends on a number of factors, including location, so please allow more time to receive your payment.
Are payments taxed?
If you are tax resident in the UK, we don’t deduct income tax from your payments. This means you should declare any payments you receive from ALCS on your Self-Assessment tax return.
However, some international collective management organisations have already deducted tax before sending the money to us. These organisations are:
- ATN (Chile)
- EAU (Estonia)
- REDES (Colombia)
- Screenrights (Australia)
- CAL (Australia)
- ZAPA (Poland)
- ZAMP (Croatia)
If you have received income from these societies, you have already paid tax on it. You should make a note of this in your UK tax returns.
If you live (and are tax resident) outside of the UK, we are obliged to withhold UK tax at the current rate of 20% (on UK-sourced royalties only). If you believe you’re exempt from withholding tax, you need to contact HMRC who will issue a certificate of exemption. Tax deductions will then no longer be applied to payments you receive from us.
As tax is such a complex subject, we are not able to provide bespoke advice on an individual basis. If you have questions or concerns, you should speak to an accountant or tax adviser.
How will I view my statement?
If you are due a payment in this distribution, you will receive an email letting you know that you can download your statement.
You will find your statement in your account in the folder marked ‘2026-2027’ and you can either:
- download it or
- click to have it emailed to you as a PDF
- To download your statement in PDF format, click on Request Statement Download.
- When your statement is ready for download, the message will change to Download Statement.
- Click on Download Statement and your statement will download (most likely to your computer’s Downloads folder).
- Alternatively, click the option that emails your statement over to you.
Where does the money come from?
We collect money for writers from over 100 sources around the world where your books, scripts, articles or visual contributions are being used.
For a brief explanation of our biggest sources of income, watch the video below or read this article.
What does this income source on my statement mean?
If your statement, which contains a breakdown of the money we have collected for you, includes any of these:
Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd/10201/United Kingdom/Other/Business/Date
Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd/10235/United Kingdom/Other/Government/Date
Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd/10417/United Kingdom/Other/Local Authority/Date
This is money we have collected for workplace AI permissions. Following last year’s updates to licences offered by the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA), we have begun to collect income from licensed workplace uses of AI.
These licence updates introduced permissions for AI prompting. This means that when employees in licensed workplaces use legally acquired material from licensed works to prompt AI models, the authors of those works will receive payment. For example, an employee may copy a passage from a book into an AI tool and ask it to provide a summary. This permission does not cover the use of that book to train the AI model itself.
This is the first instance of ALCS paying members for AI uses of their work, an important milestone as we seek to ensure that, even in the age of AI, writers are paid wherever their works are used.
Find out more about your statement here.
