Each tax year you can pay a certain amount into ISAs. This is your ISA allowance.
Each tax year you get a new ISA allowance. For the tax year 2020/2021, the adult ISA allowance is £20,000 and the Junior ISA (JISA) allowance is £9,000. The tax year runs from 6th April until 5th April the following year.
A payment to an ISA is called a subscription. You are allowed to 'subscribe' the maximum ISA allowance in each tax year, but there are some rules around using your allowance.
Each tax year you can subscribe the full ISA allowance to one type of ISA or split the allowance across different types of ISA.
Exceptions to this are the Lifetime ISA and Help-to-Buy ISA (which is a type of Cash ISA) which have lower individual account limits.
You can only subscribe to one ISA of each type each tax year.
This means that you cannot subscribe part of your allowance in a Danske Cash ISA and part of your allowance in a cash ISA with another provider in the same tax year. This includes subscriptions to a Help-to-Buy ISA, which is a type of cash ISA.
Any money withdrawn from your ISA can only be repaid into the ISA where permitted by your remaining ISA allowance.
An exception to this is if your cash ISA is a ‘flexible ISA’ which permits money withdrawn to be repaid to the ISA within the same tax year without impacting your ISA allowance. The Danske Cash ISA is not a flexible ISA.
You don’t have to use your full allowance but you can’t go over it.
However, if you don’t use it, you lose it as you cannot carry any unused ISA allowance into the following tax year.
If you are age 16 or 17, you are eligible for both an adult cash ISA and a Junior ISA.
This means that for 2 years only, you can have 2 separate subscription allowances.