Disability Living Allowance for Heart Failure: PIP2 and Points

Disability Living Allowance is no longer open to adults with heart failure in the UK. If you’re 16 or older and under State Pension age, the benefit that replaced it is Personal Independence Payment, which pays up to £194.60 a week if you qualify for the enhanced rate of both components. Whether you get anything, and how much, turns on how heart failure limits your daily tasks and movement — not on the diagnosis itself.¹

Which Benefit Applies at Your Age

PIP is the working-age benefit. You can claim it if you’re 16 or older, under State Pension age, have a physical or mental health condition that makes daily tasks or getting around difficult, and expect those difficulties to last at least 12 months from when they started.²

If you’ve already reached State Pension age, PIP isn’t available as a new claim. You’d apply for Attendance Allowance instead, which pays either £73.90 or £110.40 a week depending on whether you need help by day, at night, or both, after six months of needing that help.³⁴ Attendance Allowance has no mobility component, but it isn’t means-tested and can lift your entitlement to Pension Credit or Housing Benefit.

DLA itself is now only for children under 16.⁵ Adults born before 9 April 1948 who still hold a DLA award can keep it; everyone else on DLA is eventually moved across to PIP.

PIP has two components you can qualify for separately or together. The daily living component covers extra costs from difficulty with tasks like preparing food, washing, dressing, and managing medication. The mobility component covers difficulty moving around or planning and following journeys.

How Heart Failure Translates Into Points

The DWP scores you against 12 activities (10 daily living, 2 mobility). Each activity has a set of descriptors carrying different point values. You need at least 8 points in a component for the standard rate and 12 or more for the enhanced rate. Within any one activity only your highest-scoring descriptor counts, but scores across different activities add up.

Every descriptor is judged against a reliability test: can you do the activity safely, to an acceptable standard, as often as reasonably needed, and in no more than twice the time someone without your condition would take?⁶ For heart failure that reliability wording matters, because you may technically be able to walk to the front door or make a sandwich once — but not repeatedly, not safely, and not without collapsing back into a chair afterwards.

Assessment is also based on what you can do on more than half of your days over the qualifying period.⁶ Bad days count if they’re the majority.

Mobility: The Distance You Can Walk

The “moving around” activity is where most heart failure claimants pick up mobility points. Scores step up as your walking distance falls:

0 points: more than 200 metres
4 points: between 50 and 200 metres
8 points: between 20 and 50 metres without an aid
10 points: between 20 and 50 metres only with an aid
12 points: no more than 20 metres, or unable to stand at all

Someone who has to stop for breath after 15 metres scores 12 points on this activity alone, which is enough for enhanced mobility.⁶ People classified as NYHA Class III or IV, with marked limitation or symptoms at rest, are most likely to reach the higher-scoring descriptors.

Daily Living: Where Fatigue and Treatment Add Up

Heart failure reaches well beyond walking. Several daily living activities commonly score:

Preparing food. If breathlessness or fatigue stops you standing long enough to cook a simple meal safely, or you need someone else to cook, you can score up to 8 points.⁶
Managing treatment. Heart failure regimes are often heavy: multiple medications at different times, blood pressure checks, daily weighing to track fluid, clinic visits. If help with therapy takes more than 3.5 hours a week you score at least 4 points, rising to 8 points above 14 hours a week.
Washing and bathing. Needing help getting in or out of the bath because of breathlessness or dizziness, or being unable to wash below the waist, is worth 2 to 4 points.
Dressing and undressing. Bending brings on breathlessness and fatigue for many people with heart failure, and depending on how much help you need this is worth 2 to 8 points.

Points add across activities. Four for cooking, four for treatment, and two for washing already reaches 10, which is standard-rate daily living and one step from enhanced.

Building the Medical Evidence

Evidence is what carries the claim. The DWP needs paperwork that ties heart failure to specific limitations, not just a letter confirming the diagnosis.

Useful documents include recent cardiology letters describing your functional classification and prognosis, echocardiogram reports showing your Left Ventricular Ejection Fraction, hospital discharge summaries from any admissions, and a full current medication list with dosages. An LVEF below 35–40% is particularly persuasive because it directly measures how well your heart is pumping, which maps onto exercise tolerance and breathlessness.

Ask your GP, cardiologist, or heart failure nurse to describe your limitations in practical terms as well as clinical ones. “Becomes breathless after walking approximately 20 metres on flat ground” is far more useful than “NYHA Class III heart failure” on its own. Both belong in the evidence, but the functional line is what the assessor can match to descriptors.

Filling In the PIP2 Form

Once you’ve phoned the DWP to register a claim, you’ll be sent the PIP2 form, “How Your Disability Affects You.”⁷ The most common mistake heart failure claimants make here is describing their best day.

Describe a typical bad day and be concrete about it. “I can walk about 30 metres before I have to stop for two or three minutes because of breathlessness” is the level of detail that converts into points. If fluid retention leaves you barely able to get out of bed for a week at a time, say how often that happens and what it stops you doing. If cooking a meal leaves you needing an hour of rest afterwards, that goes to the reliability test.

Cover the whole treatment burden when you fill in “Managing treatment”: sorting pills into a dosette box, monitoring blood pressure, daily weighing for fluid, appointments, and the effects of the drugs themselves — dizziness from beta-blockers, frequent urination from diuretics. Hours add up faster than people expect, and the higher points bands are triggered by weekly time.

You also need to satisfy the required period condition: the condition must have already affected you for at least three months and be expected to continue for at least nine more.⁸ Most heart failure diagnoses clear this easily.

The Assessment Consultation

After the DWP reviews your form and evidence, a healthcare professional usually contacts you for a consultation. It may be face-to-face, by phone, or by video. The assessor works through the activities and looks for consistency between the form, your medical evidence, and what you say.

The assessor probably isn’t a cardiologist. Translate. Rather than “dyspnoea on exertion,” say “I get so breathless after four or five stairs that I have to sit down for several minutes.” Say what happens afterwards too. If a task wipes you out for an hour, that belongs in the answer.

If getting to a face-to-face assessment would itself be hard because of your condition, say so when the appointment is being arranged. Telephone, video, and in some cases home visits are available.

What You’d Be Paid, and What Else It Opens Up

PIP is paid at four possible rates:

Daily Living standard: £76.70 a week
Daily Living enhanced: £114.60 a week
Mobility standard: £30.30 a week
Mobility enhanced: £80.00 a week

Both enhanced rates together come to £194.60 a week, over £10,100 a year.¹ PIP is not means-tested, so savings, a partner’s income, and other benefits don’t reduce it. It’s also tax-free.

A PIP award can bring other support with it. Scoring 8 or more points on “moving around” automatically qualifies you for a Blue Badge.⁹ The enhanced mobility rate qualifies you for the Motability scheme, which lets you lease a car, scooter, or powered wheelchair using your mobility payment. PIP can also increase means-tested benefits such as Universal Credit.

Special Rules for End of Life

If your clinician would not be surprised if you had less than 12 months to live, you can claim under the Special Rules for End of Life. These claims skip the assessment, are processed within days, and automatically award the enhanced daily living rate.¹⁰ Your GP, cardiologist, or heart failure nurse specialist completes an SR1 form confirming that the condition is progressive and that death could reasonably be expected within 12 months. There is no penalty if you live longer than that; the guidance is explicit that there are no negative consequences for the clinician or the patient in that situation.

If You’re Turned Down

A large share of PIP decisions are overturned on challenge, so a refusal is not the end of the claim. The first step is mandatory reconsideration: you ask the DWP to look again, ideally with fresh evidence aimed at the descriptors where you were scored too low. You normally have one month from the date on your decision letter.¹¹

If reconsideration doesn’t move the decision, you can appeal to an independent tribunal. The tribunal takes a fresh look, usually with a doctor, a disability-qualified member, and a judge on the panel. You can bring new medical evidence and explain, in person, what heart failure does to your day. Claims that succeed at tribunal tend to be the ones backed by strong medical evidence and described in concrete, practical terms.

Keep your decision letter after any award. You’ll need it to prove entitlement for a Blue Badge and other linked support, and it sets the points, components, rate, and length of award you’d rely on in any future review.

1
GOV.UK. Benefit and Pension Rates 2026 to 2027
2
GOV.UK. Personal Independence Payment Eligibility
3
GOV.UK. Attendance Allowance: What You’ll Get
4
GOV.UK. Attendance Allowance – Eligibility
5
GOV.UK. Disability Living Allowance (DLA) for Children: Eligibility
6
GOV.UK. PIP Assessment Guide Part 2: The Assessment Criteria
7
Department for Work and Pensions. Personal Independence Payment PIP2 Information Booklet
8
GOV.UK. PIP Handbook – Section: Required Period Condition
9
GOV.UK. Who Can Get a Blue Badge?
10
GOV.UK. The Special Rules for End of Life: Information for Healthcare Professionals
11
GOV.UK. Challenge a Benefit Decision (Mandatory Reconsideration): Eligibility