Guides to gilts and to using GiltIQ, written against the site's own data and pages.
The gilt is unchanged inside an ISA, but because the account shelters its coupons from UK income tax, the net redemption yield inside the wrapper matches the gross yield, while outside it the net figure falls by the tax on the coupon at the holder's band.
The gilt is the same instrument whichever wrapper holds it, but the wrapper decides how its coupons are taxed — and for gilts, whose gains are already tax-exempt, the shelter that matters is income tax.
A gilt bought below £100 is bought at a discount and one bought above it at a premium, and the clean price relative to par is exactly what the yield to redemption reconciles into a return.
What a gilt costs to deal is not one fee but a shape — a commission, a spread, or neither — and understanding the shape is what lets a stated dealing cost sit honestly beside the yield the market quotes.
The DMO runs a purchase and sale service that lets members of the public deal gilts directly with the issuer rather than through a broker, and walking it step by step shows where it differs from a platform order.
A gilt trade has two dates — the dealing day it is agreed and the later settlement date the cash and the gilt actually change hands — and the gap between them decides the accrued interest and whether the next coupon is yours.
A green gilt is an ordinary gilt whose proceeds are earmarked for environmental projects, and reading its own gross yield against the fitted curve — which it sits outside — is how the market's view of it becomes visible.
A settled gilt trade comes down to one equation — the dirty price paid equals the clean price plus accrued interest — and the settlement date, the nominal and any dealing cost all hang off it.
The gilt list is a dealing screen in miniature — a clean price, a yield and a change figure for every gilt — and reading the columns in the order a trade needs them turns a wall of numbers into an answer.
The cash that leaves your account on a gilt trade is the dirty price for the nominal you bought, plus any dealing cost, and it is worked from the clean price and the accrued interest to the settlement date.
The clean price is what the gilt is worth and the dirty price is the cash you hand over, and the difference between them is the accrued interest built up to the settlement date.
When a trade is booked, GiltIQ records the yield at the moment of the trade for that lot, so each purchase carries the yield it was actually struck at rather than a blended figure across a holding.