Guidance for Candidates and Agents at Scottish Parliament elections

You have a separate spending limit in the short campaign and in the long campaign.

Your limits are set out in the tables below. They depend on a number of factors:

• whether you are a candidate in a constituency or a region
• whether a constituency is a burgh or a county constituency
• how many entries are on the register in a constituency

The number of entries on the local government register in a particular constituency is based on the electoral register as it stands on the last date for publication of the notice of election. This means that you will not know the exact figure you can spend in the long campaign until it has ended.  

Your local Electoral Registration Officer will be able to give you current elector numbers on request, which will help you to plan your expenses in the long campaign.

You are able to find information about regions and which constituencies are burghs and which are counties, either by contacting your local Electoral Registration Officer or the Boundary Commission for Scotland.

The table below sets out the fixed and variable amounts that apply to different types of candidate: 

For more information on party spending see our guidance for parties at the Scottish Parliamentary election.

Dual candidates

If you are a dual candidate you are subject to the spending limits for both types of candidate that you are standing as.

Spending will not count towards both limits. It will be one or the other. In some cases you may need to split spending – see splitting spending for more details.