Help To Buy ISA transfer / partial withdrawal

Hnyval29

I have Help to Buy ISA from previous years (with Halifax, if that matters), i.e. no contributions this year apart from interest payments. It is about £15k, and government bonus is paid only on £12k, so essentially £3k is not doing much as I'd earn bigger interest elsewhere.

I know that if I transfer these extra £3k into LISA it would count towards this year's LISA allowance (max. £4k/year), i.e. I'd only be able to put another £1k into LISA this year. But would this also reduce my total ISA allowance for this year (i.e. £20k to £17k)?

And what about transferring Help to Buy ISA into another cash ISA (not LISA)?

Q1: Are partial transfers out of Help to Buy ISA allowed? Or it would need to be a partial withdrawal?

Q2: If transferring old Help to Buy ISA to a standard cash ISA, would I still have full £20k ISA allowance for the current financial year?

eskbanker

There's nothing in the scheme rules preventing partial transfers from HTB ISAs to other ISAs (product-specific terms may differ), and if you use the receiving provider's transfer process then it has no effect on your current year contribution allowance, so you still have £20K if you haven't paid in to any yet.