Artist resale rights give you a royalty every time one of your original works is resold through a gallery, dealer or auction house for £1,000 or more, at rates running from 4% down to 0.25% and capped at £12,500 per sale.
Key Takeaways
- The royalty only bites on resales of £1,000 or more handled by an art market professional. Private sales between individuals fall outside the scheme entirely.
- Rates run on a cumulative sliding scale from 4% down to 0.25%, with a hard ceiling of £12,500 on any single sale.
- The seller carries the legal liability, but art market professionals share it jointly, which is why the auction house or dealer normally handles the payment.
- You cannot invoice a dealer yourself. The royalty has to be collected through DACS or ACS, both of which deduct 15% for administration.
- Resale royalties are taxable income, and the gross figure belongs in your accounts with the collecting society’s commission claimed as an expense.
- HMRC treats the payment as outside the scope of VAT, so it never counts toward your VAT registration threshold.
- The right passes to your heirs and keeps paying for 70 years after your death, which makes it an asset your estate has to account for.
Table of contents
- 1. What are artist resale rights?
- 2. Which sales trigger a royalty?
- 3. How much the royalty is worth?
- 4. Who pays artist resale rights?
- 5. How to claim what you are owed?
- 6. How resale royalties are taxed?
- 7. Do resale royalties count for VAT?
- 8. What happens to the right when an artist dies?
- 9. Getting the right advice on your resale royalties
1. What are artist resale rights?
Artist’s Resale Right (ARR) is a statutory entitlement to a slice of the sale price each time one of your original works changes hands on the secondary market through a professional intermediary. It came into UK law in 2006 through the Artist’s Resale Right Regulations, which implemented an EU directive, and it survived Brexit intact.
The idea is older than the legislation.
French lawmakers created the original droit de suite after the family of painter Jean-François Millet lived in poverty while his canvases traded for fortunes. Visual artists sell a work once and see nothing when it resells at ten times the price, unlike a composer or a novelist who earns on every reproduction.
The resale right closes part of that gap for the arts and culture sector.
Two features make the right unusual. It runs for your lifetime plus 70 years, matching the copyright term, so it outlives you. And you cannot waive it, sell it or sign it away in a contract: a dealer who asks you to give up your resale royalty is asking for something the law will not allow.
2. Which sales trigger a royalty?
Four things have to line up before a royalty becomes payable:
- the work qualifies,
- you qualify,
- the price reaches £1,000, and
- an art market professional is involved in the sale.
The conditions in full, as they apply to a UK sale:
- The work is a copyright-protected piece of graphic or plastic art: a painting, drawing, collage, engraving, print, sculpture, tapestry, ceramic, glassware or photograph.
- You are a national of the UK, the EEA, Australia or New Zealand, or another country with a reciprocal arrangement.
- The sale price reaches or exceeds £1,000, measured before VAT and before any buyer’s premium.
- An auction house, gallery or dealer is acting as seller, buyer or agent.
- The sale is a resale, not the first transfer of the work out of your hands.
That definition reaches further than most people expect. Tapestry, glassware and studio ceramics all count, so ceramicists and other makers can be sitting on resale income they have never claimed. Furniture making and dressmaking sit outside it, because those are treated as works of craft rather than artistic works.
Two exemptions are worth knowing
- Sales to public, non-profit museums carry no royalty.
- Neither does the “bought as stock” resale, where a dealer bought the work directly from you less than three years earlier and resells it for £10,000 or less.
Prints and limited editions
Prints do qualify, provided the copy was one of a limited number made by you or under your authority.
The Regulations set no upper limit on edition size, so a large edition is not automatically excluded, and prints bought from a publishing house and then resold to the public are caught in the same way as a unique work. Editions are usually assessed against the British Standards classification of prints.
Private sales and online marketplaces
A straight private sale between two individuals produces no royalty, and that includes most eBay listings – if one collector sells to another with nobody in the trade involved, the right simply does not engage.
What matters is the presence of an art market professional, not the venue. A dealer selling through an online marketplace is still a dealer, and the royalty applies exactly as it would in the saleroom.
3. How much the royalty is worth?
The artist resale rights percentage starts at 4% and falls as the price climbs, and the bands are cumulative in the same way income tax bands are. You do not apply one rate to the whole price.
The scale that applies to sales from 1 April 2024 onward:
| Property value portion | Rate |
|---|---|
| Up to £50,000 | 4% |
| £50,000.01 – £200,000 | 3% |
| £200,000.01 – £350,000 | 1% |
| £350,000.01 – £500,000 | 0.5% |
| Above £500,000 | 0.25% |
Work a few numbers through and the shape becomes obvious. A drawing that sells for £5,000 produces £200. A canvas at £200,000 produces £6,500 – £2,000 from the first band plus £4,500 from the second. The £12,500 cap only comes into play at a sale price of £2 million, so almost every artist working today will never reach it.
4. Who pays artist resale rights?
The seller is legally responsible for the royalty, and the art market professional involved in the sale shares that liability. Between them they settle it: you are never chasing an individual collector for money.
In practice the auction house or gallery calculates the royalty, collects it and passes it to the collecting society.
Some auction houses recover the cost from the buyer by adding it as a separate line on the invoice, which is why you will occasionally see ARR listed alongside the buyer’s premium. That is a commercial arrangement between the parties and does not change who the law holds responsible.
Dealers and auction houses also carry a disclosure duty.
They have to keep records of qualifying resales and hand over the details when a collecting society asks, and that obligation has teeth. DACS and ACS took a London dealer to court in 2022 over years of unanswered information requests; the case settled in 2023 with a commitment to cooperate, and it put the trade on notice that keeping proper business records is part of the job rather than an optional extra.
5. How to claim what you are owed?
You claim by mandating a collecting society – either the Design and Artists Copyright Society (DACS) or the Artists’ Collecting Society (ACS). Individual artists cannot invoice art market professionals directly, because the right is subject to mandatory collective management.
Registration is free at both societies. Once you are mandated, they monitor auction and gallery sales, identify works by artists on their books, calculate what is due, invoice the trade and pay you. Each deducts 15% of the royalty to cover the cost of running the service, so £200 gross reaches you as £170.
6. How resale royalties are taxed?
Resale royalties are taxable income. If you are a practising artist trading on your own account, they form part of your self-employment profits and go on the self-employment pages of your tax return alongside sales, commissions and teaching fees.
Income tax and Self Assessment
Declare the gross royalty, not the amount that landed in your bank.
The remittance statement from DACS or ACS shows both figures, and the 15% commission goes in as an expense on the other side. Since 2024/25 the cash basis is the default for sole traders, so unless you have opted out you record the royalty in the year the money arrives rather than the year the artwork sold – and those can easily be different tax years.
If a strong year of resales pushes your bill past £1,000, you also move into payments on account, which front-loads the following year’s tax.
Averaging relief for fluctuating profits
Averaging relief lets creators smooth two consecutive tax years when profits swing hard, which is exactly what a single large resale can do to an artist’s year. HMRC applies it where more than half your profit comes from creative works you made personally.
A claim needs the profits of one year to fall below 75% of the other, or one year to be nil. You then pay tax on the averaged figure across both years instead of the actual profits, which pulls income out of a higher rate band in the spike year.
7. Do resale royalties count for VAT?
Resale royalties sit outside the scope of VAT.
Because the royalty is not a taxable supply, it does not count toward the VAT registration threshold. An artist sitting close to the line can receive a substantial resale royalty without it pushing them over. Do not add it to your rolling twelve-month turnover test, and do not put VAT on it.
The same logic runs through the sale itself. Where a buyer pays the seller an amount that includes the resale royalty, that element is stripped out of the consideration for the artwork. It is why the royalty is always calculated on the hammer or sale price excluding VAT.
8. What happens to the right when an artist dies?
The right passes to whoever inherits it and keeps generating royalties until 70 years after the artist’s death. The UK extended the scheme to deceased artists’ estates on 1 January 2012, six years after living artists first benefited.
The estate or beneficiary has to register the mandate with a collecting society in the same way the artist would have, keep the paperwork current as the right passes down through further generations, and report the receipts correctly.
9. Getting the right advice on your resale royalties
WallsMan Creative are accountants for the UK creative industries, working with painters, printmakers, sculptors, photographers and makers alongside the studios and galleries they sell through. Income that arrives in irregular lumps from collecting societies, licensing and commissions is the normal shape of an artist’s year for us rather than an awkward exception, and we handle the reporting, the averaging claims and the estate questions that come with it.
The resale right is one of the few pieces of UK law that pays visual artists for the appreciation in their own work. Claiming it means mandating a collecting society and then treating the money properly: gross income in the accounts, commission as an expense, no VAT, and an eye on whether a spike in a strong year justifies an averaging claim.
If you have resale royalties coming in and you are not sure they are landing in the right place on your return, or you are handling an artist’s estate and need the right valued, we are happy to talk it through.
