Someone with no surplus income cannot fund a trust deed at all. Someone who owns a home cannot use a MAP at all.

What follows sets them against each other on entry, length, cost, what you keep and how each one fails. How a MAP works and what a protected trust deed is cover each on its own.

A MAP has eight conditions in section 2(2) and every one has to be met. A trust deed has one hard threshold and an affordability test.

The trust deed threshold runs the other way

There is a statutory minimum. Section 164(3) of the Bankruptcy (Scotland) Act 2016 requires your total debts, including interest, to be not less than £5,000 at the date you grant the deed.

So the two schemes fail people from opposite directions. Owing £3,000 rules out a trust deed, and owing £30,000 rules out a MAP, which how much debt you need for a trust deed covers in detail.

The income tests point in opposite directions too

A MAP requires a nil assessment or six months of prescribed payments as your only income. Section 168(1) requires a trust deed to state that you will pay contributions from income during the payment period.

One route asks you to prove you can pay nothing. The other asks you to prove you can pay something every month for four years.

The entry tests side by side

No minimum debt is currently prescribed for the Minimal Asset Process. The old £1,500 floor stopped applying on 6 February 2023, though the power to set one again remains.

Six months against four years. Section 140(1) discharges a MAP debtor on the date six months after the award, and section 168(2)(a) sets a trust deed payment period of 48 months from the date the deed is granted.

What follows each ending

After a MAP discharge, section 146 applies disclosure conditions for a further six months. Twelve months is the whole restriction period in an ordinary case.

A trust deed carries a four-year acquirenda clause instead. Section 167(1)(b) conveys estate you acquire in the four years after granting, and how long a trust deed lasts sets out how the period is measured.

The discharge itself works differently

A MAP discharge happens by operation of law on a fixed date. Nobody applies for it and nobody can defer it.

A trust deed discharge comes at the end of the process through the trustee, and it is not automatic in the same way. That difference is worth weighing if co-operation is likely to be difficult.

There is no fee to apply for Minimal Asset Process bankruptcy. The fee that used to apply was removed on 6 February 2023, and the Accountant in Bankruptcy’s own guidance lists no application fee.

A MAP costs nothing in and pays nothing out

A debtor contribution order is still made, and it is fixed at zero. Paragraph 1 of Schedule 1 disapplies sections 122 and 131, so there are no creditor claims and no dividend.

A trust deed takes your whole surplus

Section 168(5) sends the whole of your surplus income to creditors for the payment period, and section 168(4) caps the total at less than your debts with interest.

The trustee’s costs come out of that money rather than being billed on top. Section 183(1) allows remuneration only by a fixed fee, a percentage of the estate realised, and outlays.

What creditors actually receive

No percentage can honestly be promised at the outset. What is written off is whatever is left unpaid when you are discharged, which depends on what you can afford over the term and what your estate realises.

The Accountant in Bankruptcy publishes the outcome rather than the promise.

Across every protected trust deed in Scotland in 2025-26, including those that paid nothing at all, creditors received a mean of 18.1 pence for every pound they were owed, up from 16.3 pence the year before. That is an average across thousands of cases and not a forecast of yours.

You must not own land. Section 2(2)(e) rules out a MAP for anyone who does, whatever it is worth.

The clearest dividing line between the two

If your name is on a title, a MAP is closed to you whatever the property is worth, and whether you can get a MAP if you own a house explains why value never enters the question.

A trust deed is open to a homeowner, with the property handled as part of the estate. That is the single commonest reason someone ends up in one rather than the other.

The car figures are different, and this is where pages go wrong

A vehicle you reasonably require and which is worth no more than £3,000 is left out of the asset calculation altogether, under section 2(3)(b).

The figure is £1,000, not the £3,000 most pages print. A trust deed conveys the estate except what would be excluded on sequestration, which routes through section 88(1)(a) of the 2016 Act to section 11(1)(b) of the Debt Arrangement and Attachment (Scotland) Act 2002: a vehicle reasonably required by the debtor and not exceeding £1,000 in value.

The £3,000 belongs to a different test. Section 2(3)(b) of the 2016 Act opens with the words for the purposes of subsection (2)(c) and (d), which is Minimal Asset Process eligibility, and it has been generalised into advice about trust deeds where it does not apply.

So the same car can fall on both sides

A £2,500 car is outside the MAP tests altogether and above the trust deed exemption at the same time. The trust deed figure comes through section 11 of the Debt Arrangement and Attachment (Scotland) Act 2002, and whether you lose your car in a trust deed covers that route.

What you own, under each

A MAP, and by weeks. Section 72(2) of the Debtors (Scotland) Act 1987 ends an existing earnings arrestment on the date sequestration is awarded.

A trust deed does the same job later

Section 173 ends an earnings arrestment, a current maintenance arrestment and a conjoined arrestment order on the date of protection.

Protection runs from the date of registration, under section 163(2), not from the date you sign. The weeks in between are the exposed period.

Why the gap exists

Section 193 fixes the relevant period at five weeks beginning with the date the notice under section 169 is registered.

Deductions keep coming out of your pay throughout that window. That is not a criticism of trust deeds, it is a timing fact to plan around.

What covers the gap

A statutory moratorium gives six months of protection and you get one per rolling 12 months. It stops service of a charge for payment, stops new diligence and stops creditor petitions for sequestration.

The limit of one in any twelve months is in section 195(2) of the 2016 Act. The six months itself has applied since 1 October 2022.

A statutory moratorium is the exception. It does not stop an earnings arrestment that was already running: section 197(5)(d) of the Bankruptcy (Scotland) Act 2016 lets a creditor carry on executing an earnings arrestment, a current maintenance arrestment or a conjoined arrestment order that came into effect before the moratorium began.

So a moratorium buys time against new action while the deed is registered. Only the relevant cut-off date ends a deduction already running.

Not at the same time. Section 172(1)(b) stops you making a debtor application for your own sequestration for as long as a protected trust deed subsists.

Which way round the doors open

So you cannot sign a trust deed and then apply for a MAP while it is still running. The deed has to end first.

A trust deed can also lead to sequestration without your asking. Section 2(1)(b)(iv) lets a trust deed trustee petition where you fail to comply with the deed, or where the trustee says it is in the creditors’ best interests.

What a previous trust deed does to MAP eligibility

The conditions in section 2(2) refer only to an award of sequestration, and a protected trust deed is not one. No published guidance addresses the point either way, so ask your money adviser before relying on it.

So it is a question to settle with your adviser rather than to assume either way. Whether you are eligible for a MAP sets out the two look-back conditions the point turns on.

Both can, in different ways. A MAP can stop being a MAP, and a trust deed can fail to become protected at all or come apart on missed payments.

How a MAP goes wrong

Paragraph 2 of Schedule 1 lets the Accountant in Bankruptcy end the MAP modifications where you can make a contribution, where assets exceed £2,000, or where the application was wrong.

An inheritance you never asked for can do it. Whether a MAP can be transferred to full administration sets out what changes if it happens.

How a trust deed goes wrong

Protection is not a formality. Section 170(2) deems creditors to have acceded unless enough of them object in writing within the relevant period.

The objection has to come from a majority in number of the notified creditors, or from creditors holding not less than a third by value. Silence counts as accession.

That is the opposite of how it is usually described. The test is whether enough creditors object, not whether enough approve, and a creditor who never replies is counted as having accepted.

After two consecutive missed contributions, section 174 lets the trustee instruct your employer to deduct the payment, and what happens if your trust deed fails covers the rest.

The two failure modes compared

What they have in common

• Both appear on the public Register of Insolvencies, which anyone may search.
• Both affect your credit file for years, on the agencies’ own retention schedules rather than by any statutory rule.
• Neither writes off court fines, debts from fraud or breach of trust, aliment or student loans.
• Both should be chosen on your own figures, with a money adviser, and both are free to get advice about.

On scale, the Accountant in Bankruptcy publishes median debt levels rather than averages. Should you choose a trust deed or a MAP runs the decision the other way round.

The median debt was £32,100 in a full administration sequestration and £12,400 in a Minimal Asset Process case.