Cycle To Work scheme

(Last updated March 2025)

If your company is signed up to a Cycle to Work Scheme, you can save 25-39% on your new bike.

How it works

The UKAEA Cycle to Work Scheme (link to nucleus - N/A to non-UKAEA employees) is administered through Cyclescheme. This is how the Cyclescheme works.

1. You apply for an arbitrary value of Cyclescheme certificate. (Worth up to £2500)

2. The Cyclescheme notifies your employer (e.g. UKAEA) of your application.

3. The employer pays the Cyclescheme the value specified in that certificate, while deducting the same amount from the employee's salary pre-tax.

   • For UKAEA specifically, the finance department initiates a workflow in U4BW. Once all the appropriate people involved in the U4BW workflow (this would include you, i.e. the employee) approves it, UKAEA would then deduct your salary for the next 12 months accordingly.

   • The UKAEA finance department pays Cyclescheme the corresponding value of the certificate in the next pay cycle (The pay cycles are 2 weeks long and ends on Mondays).

4. The Cyclescheme certificate is then approved, and can be used in-store or online against any purchases on cycling and cycle accessories.

The details of how much you would save using the certificate (as opposed to paying out of pocket) can be calculated using the calculator. 

Should I underestimate or overestimate my bike purchase value, when making my Cycle To Work Scheme application?

The approval process may take up to a month, in which you may change your mind about what bike to get, or the price of the bike may change, or you may realize you want more/fewer bike accessories. It is possible to undo a bike certificate request as long as the certificate isn't spent yet; but it would lengthen the waiting time as you have to effectively start a completely new application, going through all 4 steps above, which means you will wait for up to 2 weeks for it to go through (or more if the finance department is busy).

Now, as the unused value of the certificate would be wasted (i.e. Use It or Lose It), it is best to underestimate the value of your bike purchase than it is to overestimate it, so that you won't end up having too much of your salary deducted without being able to utilize that value.

The difference between "Cycle To Work Scheme", "Cyclescheme", and "Cycle2Work" etc.

Lexically these terms have negligible differences, but practically their differences cannot be ignored. The umbrella term Cycle To Work schemes is a list of salary-sacrifice schemes approved by Sustrans and HMRC for employee to buy bikes at a reduced cost.

Within the list of "Cycle To Work schemes", UKAEA is signed up to the Cyclescheme. This is distinct from (and therefore excludes) the Cycle2Work scheme provided by Halfords. Therefore, as a UKAEA employee you cannot redeem the cycle scheme voucher in Halfords (last confirmed in October 2023). (However, you can still buy bikes from Tredz, which sells all the same brands of bikes as Halfords, as Tredz is one of the selected retailers in the Cyclescheme.)

We currently don't have any information on how other tenant companies on the Culham site use the Cycle To Work scheme. However, the process should be similar. If you would like to write for this section of the website, please get in touch with us using one of the @culbug.uk email addresses.