What the Act does contain is a guarantee that something goes unpaid, and a method for working out how much you contribute. Those two things are the real answer.

Here is the guarantee, the method, what creditors actually received last year, and why the advertised percentages differ so wildly. What a protected trust deed is covers the solution itself.

No. No percentage can honestly be promised at the outset, because what is written off is the balance left when the payment period ends and your estate has been dealt with.

Why the frame itself is misleading

Write off is a marketing word rather than a legal one. Nothing is cancelled at the start, and nothing is cancelled on a sliding scale.

What actually happens is that you pay a contribution for a set period, your assets are realised, creditors are paid a dividend out of that, and the remaining balance on the debts covered by the deed goes when the Accountant in Bankruptcy registers your discharge.

So what is the number that matters to you?

Your monthly contribution and how long it runs. Those are the two figures a trustee can actually give you once your income, expenditure and assets have been assessed.

A provider quoting a write-off figure before that assessment is quoting a marketing maximum. How trust deed monthly payments are calculated sets out where the real number comes from.

That an individual’s income contributions will total less than the debt. Section 168(4) requires contributions over the payment period to result in payment of a sum less than the total amount of your debts, including interest, at the date you grant the deed.

A refusal ground read the other way round

The Accountant in Bankruptcy applies section 168 as a reason to refuse protection where the projected contributions would repay all the debts and interest over the term.

Read from the debtor’s side, that is a statutory guarantee that a protected trust deed is a partial-payment arrangement. Parliament required that something goes unpaid.

What it did not do is require anybody to be able to tell you how much, in advance, and nobody can.

The mirror image, which is not the same test

Section 168(3) lets the trustee set a shorter payment period, but only where payment from income or otherwise would allow the estate to meet the debts in full.

So the two subsections point in opposite directions and must not be blurred. A debtor with real assets can end up paying everything, and a debtor whose only resource is income cannot, by law, be made to.

Where that leaves someone who can pay in full

Not in a trust deed. The route usually considered instead is the Debt Arrangement Scheme, which repays debt in full with interest, fees and charges frozen and written off on completion.

As a budget exercise, not a negotiation. Your income is totalled, your expenditure is tested against the Common Financial Statement trigger figures, and section 168(5) puts the whole of the surplus towards creditors.

The chain, link by link

The income and expenditure statement goes on Form 2A, and the specified method for assessing the contribution is the Common Financial Statement under regulation 15 of the Bankruptcy (Scotland) Regulations 2016. AiB administers the trigger figures, which were last revised on 1 April 2025.

Two limits on what can fund a contribution

Contributions cannot be drawn from Universal Credit, Social Security Scotland benefits or tax credits, although those are taken into account when the trustee looks at other income.

Regulation 15(7) goes further: where income comes solely from social security benefits and tax credits, no contribution is due. How trust deed monthly payments are calculated works through the assessment.

How long it runs

Section 168(2) sets the payment period at 48 months from the date the deed is granted. It is shorter only in the section 168(3) case, and longer where contributions have been missed or where you and the trustee agree.

Across every protected trust deed in Scotland in 2025-26, creditors received an average of 18.1 pence for every pound they were owed, up from 16.3 pence the year before.

What that figure is, and what it is not

It comes from the Accountant in Bankruptcy’s Scottish Statutory Debt Solutions annual statistics for 2025-26, published on 26 August 2026, and it is the mean dividend paid to ordinary creditors across all cases including those with zero dividends.

It is an average across thousands of cases and it is not a forecast of yours. Nobody can honestly give you one before your income, your expenditure and your assets have been assessed.

Why it must not be turned upside down

The arithmetic that turns a dividend into a write-off percentage is superficially available and it is dishonest. The dividend is measured against the claims admitted in the deed.

The excluded debts below are not written off at all, and a case with realisable equity can pay far more than the average. Those two facts alone break the inversion.

Subtracting a dividend from 100 does not produce a write-off percentage, and no advertised maximum should be read against this figure as though the two were halves of the same sum. They are measured on different things, over different samples.

When a dividend is paid at all

Section 176 provides for a dividend where funds are enough, after fees, outlays and a contingency allowance, to pay at least 5 pence in the pound. For deeds granted on or after 1 July 2024, under the Protected Trust Deeds (Miscellaneous Amendment) (Scotland) Regulations 2024, the first dividend period is 12 months from the grant date and later periods are three months.

The same statistics record 4,644 protected trust deeds in 2025-26, a fall of 5.6% on the year before. Volumes are context rather than an outcome.

Because they are marketing maxima measured on different things. Several different figures circulate in this market for the same statutory product, and a maximum drawn from one firm’s own sample is not a Scotland-wide outcome.

The figures, side by side

Three things to notice about that footnote

• It is a single year of one provider group’s own cases, not a Scotland-wide figure.
• It counts administration costs inside what is described as written off.
• The mean in the same sample is 51 per cent, and the mean is the honest measure of a typical case.

None of that makes the arithmetic behind such a figure wrong on its own terms. It makes the headline unusable as a prediction of your case.

What to ask instead

Ask for the expected monthly contribution, the expected duration and the anticipated dividend, in writing, before you sign. Those figures go to your creditors anyway, and how much a trust deed costs in Scotland explains where the fees sit inside them.

Court fines and penalties, debts from fraud or breach of trust, aliment and maintenance obligations, student loans, secured debts and anything arising after the date you grant the deed. The list is statutory and nobody can widen it.

The exclusions, with their provisions

The provision is section 184(6), which imports the list at section 145(3), and the student loan carve-out is section 185.

Two categories that are easy to run together

Some debts can be claimed in the deed and still survive your discharge, and some cannot go in at all. Court fines and student loans are the first kind.

Ongoing liabilities are the second: current council tax, child maintenance, insurance, rent or mortgage and utility bills, which the Scottish Government’s page on debts that can be included in a trust deed lists separately. Which debts cannot be included in a trust deed keeps the two apart in detail.

Assets and windfalls, mainly. Section 167(1)(b) binds you to convey any estate acquired in the four years beginning with the date you grant the deed.

The four-year clause most pages leave out

Section 167(1) requires the deed to convey your estate to the trustee and to bind you to convey anything acquired in that four-year window which would have been conveyed had you owned it on the day you signed.

An inheritance, a compensation payment or a lottery win inside that period therefore goes to the trustee. Telling the trustee about it is part of your duty to disclose.

What else moves the figure

Equity is the biggest single variable, and it is negotiated rather than assumed. What happens to the equity in your home in a trust deed covers both routes.

What happens to interest

Claims are valued as at the relevant date, so interest accruing after the date of granting is not claimable in the trust deed. That is a rule about the claim rather than a prohibition on the creditor’s own account.

On discharge, and discharge is not automatic at 48 months. The trustee applies to AiB on Form 5 with a statement that you met your obligations and co-operated, and the date AiB registers that application is the date of your discharge.

AiB can refuse

It looks at whether you co-operated throughout, declared your assets and income fully, made the required contributions and enabled enough realisation of assets. Any party may appeal to the sheriff within 21 days.

Since 1 July 2024 a trustee cannot refuse unilaterally either. Where a debtor has unreasonably failed to comply, the trustee applies to AiB on Form 5A for agreement.

What is not a proper reason to refuse

• A change of circumstances that prevents you paying a contribution.
• Extenuating circumstances that stop you carrying on with your obligations.
• Assets realising less than the trustee originally estimated.

If you are told otherwise, raise it with a free money adviser before you accept it, and what happens if your trust deed fails sets out where refusal leads.

One conversation worth having first

Compare a trust deed against the alternatives on your own numbers, with somebody who has nothing to sell you. Should you use a free debt charity or a paid debt adviser covers that choice, and our trust deed page sets out how the solution works.