National legal definition · Cider and perry
Cider and perry in United Kingdom excise law
The definition that decides what may be taxed and sold as cider or perry across the whole United Kingdom, set by excise law rather than by any geographical scheme.
This record was taken as at 2026-08-23 and describes an instrument administered in United Kingdom.
- Kind
- National legal definition
- Product
- Cider and perry
- Country
- United Kingdom
- Regions covered
- Stated in the specification
- Register
- HM Revenue & Customs excise notices and the alcohol duty legislation
- Record taken as at
- 2026-08-23
CiderHQ records the structure of a specification: that it defines an area, that it restricts the fruit, that it sets a minimum strength or a sweetness band. Where a figure was not verified against the register itself, this page says a threshold exists and stops there rather than reproducing a number it cannot trace. Knowing that a limit is written down, and where it is written down, is worth more than a plausible figure.
Designation rules change. Specifications are amended, and the amendments do not announce themselves. Anyone relying on this commercially — labelling a product, drafting a claim, buying under the name — must read the current specification on the register itself rather than any summary of it, including this one.
Read the register: HM Revenue & Customs · HM Revenue & Customs · Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
What the specification requires
Each requirement is recorded as a claim with its jurisdiction, its as-of date and the source it rests on. Requirements that could not carry all three are not shown.
For duty purposes cider must be produced by fermenting apple juice, and perry by fermenting pear juice, without the addition of any other alcoholic liquor. A product fermented from something else, or built up with other alcohol, falls outside the cider category however it is described.
Primary authority United Kingdom · recorded as at 2026-08-23 · HM Revenue & Customs
Duty is charged per litre of pure alcohol in strength bands. On the rates effective 1 February 2026, still cider from 3.5% to 8.4% ABV pays £10.39 per litre of pure alcohol; from 1.3% to 3.4% it pays £9.96; and from 8.5% it leaves the cider bands entirely and pays £30.62.
Primary authority United Kingdom · recorded as at 2026-08-23 · HM Revenue & Customs
The band structure is stable even though the rates are not, and it is the structure that shapes what gets made. CiderHQ states rates only with their effective date attached, because a duty figure with no date on it becomes permanent and wrong.
Sparkling cider is charged on a different band structure from still cider, and its boundary falls at 5.5% rather than 8.4%. On the same rates, sparkling cider from 5.6% to 8.4% ABV pays £26.61 per litre of pure alcohol against £10.39 for still cider at the same strength.
Primary authority United Kingdom · recorded as at 2026-08-23 · HM Revenue & Customs
This is the least-discussed and most visible rule in British cider. A sparkling cider at 5.5% and one at 5.6% are different products to the Exchequer, at roughly two and a half times the duty, and the strengths that British sparkling cider clusters at are not an accident of taste.
A minimum of 35% apple or pear juice must be included overall in making the final product for it to be cider or perry for duty purposes. Two things the bare figure hides are worth stating: concentrate and dilution both count towards it, so juice reconstituted from imported concentrate satisfies the requirement; and 35% is a tax threshold rather than a quality standard, which is why a drink can be lawfully sold as cider while being nearly two-thirds water and sugar.
Primary authority United Kingdom · recorded as at 2026-08-23 · HM Revenue & Customs
The minimum is low by international standards, which is why UK products made substantially from concentrate and water are lawfully cider and would not qualify under a French appellation.
United Kingdom law permits cider and perry to be made using concentrated juice and added water, subject to the juice-content requirement, and does not require the fruit to have been grown in the United Kingdom.
Primary authority United Kingdom · recorded as at 2026-08-23 · HM Revenue & Customs
The cider and perry duty categories apply only within a band of alcoholic strength. Above the upper limit a fermented apple product is charged as another category of alcoholic product rather than as cider, and below the lower threshold it is outside alcohol duty altogether. The current thresholds are set in the duty legislation.
Primary authority United Kingdom · recorded as at 2026-08-23 · HM Revenue & Customs, HM Revenue & Customs
Since the 2023 reform of alcohol duty, the charge on cider and perry is calculated from the volume of pure alcohol in the product rather than from a flat rate per litre of liquid, with reduced rates available for qualifying draught products and for small producers. Rates change at fiscal events and are not published here.
Primary authority United Kingdom · recorded as at 2026-08-23 · HM Revenue & Customs
The change to a strength basis is why several well-known ciders were reformulated to a slightly lower ABV, and it explains a shift a drinker may have noticed on the shelf.
This definition is a tax and trading definition. It says nothing about where the fruit was grown, what varieties were used, or how the cider was fermented, and it is entirely separate from the protected geographical names registered for Herefordshire, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire and Wales.
Primary authority United Kingdom · recorded as at 2026-08-23 · HM Revenue & Customs, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
About Cider and perry in United Kingdom excise law
The United Kingdom has no appellation system for cider and no national quality standard. What it has is an excise definition, which exists to decide what tax a product pays, and that definition has ended up carrying far more weight than it was designed for: because it settles what may lawfully be called cider, it has become the de facto national standard.
Its two consequential features are the minimum juice content and the permission to use concentrate and water. Together they mean that a drink can be lawfully sold as cider in Britain while containing a minority of apple juice, reconstituted from concentrate that may have been imported, with the balance made up of water and sugar. That is a genuine and much-debated gap between the legal meaning of the word and what most drinkers assume it means, and it is the reason British cider debate returns to juice content so persistently.
The 2023 reform moved duty onto a strength basis, so that the charge follows the alcohol in the drink rather than its volume, with separate relief for draught products and for small producers. This record does not carry rates. A duty rate is the clearest case in the whole data set of a number that goes stale silently, and the calculator on this site asks the reader to supply the current figure from HMRC rather than embedding one.
Read alongside the French and Spanish designations, the contrast is instructive rather than damning. British law regulates the product as a taxable good and leaves quality to the market and to voluntary schemes; the French and Spanish systems regulate origin and method for a subset of production and leave the rest of their markets similarly open. Neither approach guarantees that what is in a given glass is good.
What people ask next
Questions readers ask about the things this page mentions. Each one goes to the section that answers it rather than to a page written to receive the question.
- Why does the united kingdom drink so much cider — The United Kingdom accounts for a large share of world cider consumption, which is a fact about a long orchard tradition in the west of England meeting twentieth-century industrial production and a duty system that treated cider favourably.
Where to go next
- All protected designations — Every reserved name on CiderHQ, grouped by country, with what each kind of instrument does.
- Cider and perry in United Kingdom — How cider is legally defined and taxed in the country administering this name.
- How CiderHQ handles evidence — Why a requirement here states a structure rather than a figure.
Sources
What this page rests on. Where a source is marked as registered rather than read, CiderHQ is recording that the body is authoritative on the subject without claiming to have worked through the document itself. See our evidence policy for what each state means.
Alcoholic Products Technical Guide, section 2 — alcoholic products (formerly Excise Notice 162)
HM Revenue & Customs · regulator · passage verified 2026-08-24
What may be called cider or perry for UK duty purposes. The substantive text now lives in section 2 of the Alcoholic Products Technical Guide rather than in the notice itself, and the passages below were read there. The widely repeated "35% juice" figure checks out — but note two things the figure alone hides: it is a tax threshold rather than a quality standard, and concentrate and dilution both count towards it.
Alcoholic products duty rates and the Alcohol Duty regime
HM Revenue & Customs · regulator · passage verified 2026-08-24
The UK alcohol duty system was reformed in August 2023 onto a strength-based footing, with draught relief and small producer relief alongside it. The rate table was read on 2026-08-24 and carries an effective date of 1 February 2026. CiderHQ records the band *structure* — which is stable and explains why producers make the strengths they do — and states rates only with that effective date attached, because a rate with no date on it becomes permanent and wrong.
UK protected geographical food and drink names register
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs · government · passage verified 2026-08-25
The register itself is an index; the substance is in the product specification attached to each entry as a PDF. Eight cider and perry specifications were downloaded and read on 2026-08-24 — the six Three Counties names and the two Welsh ones. Reading them settled a question CiderHQ had previously described in the abstract and got wrong: the Three Counties specifications state a composition table, not a minimum juice content. The Traditional Welsh Perry specification was re-read on 2026-08-25 for the comparison with Austrian fruit-wine law, and its prohibition list transcribed in full: the two instruments turn out to regulate opposite things, one composition and one technique.