Public Lending Right

Welcome to PLR

If you are a published author, illustrator, editor, translator or audiobook narrator you could receive remuneration as a result of public library book loans. This could be up to £6,600 per year if you register for the UK PLR scheme or up to €1000 per year for the Irish PLR scheme. Join our community of over 60,000 book contributors who already benefit.

To be eligible for PLR you need to meet the following criteria;

- Be named on the title page

- To register for UK PLR your only or principal home has to be in the United Kingdom or in any of the other countries within the European Economic Area (ie EC Member States plus Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein) at the time of registration.

- To register for Irish PLR you may be a resident or a citizen of any of the countries within the EEA or United Kingdom. If you are not an EEA resident and are applying for Irish PLR as a citizen, a photocopy of your passport can be used to confirm your citizenship within the EEA.

- Any material to be registered must have a valid ISBN number (ASINs are not eligible as they ar used only by Amazon) and it has be published.

If you're eligible, you can register all the books you've contributed to for UK and Irish PLR using a single account.

Please make sure that you sign up by 30 June 2023 for inclusion in the 2022/23 calculations.

Every year we announce the most borrowed library books (including ebooks and audiobooks) from the previous year.

Existing PLR Users

If you wish to login to your PLR account click below

Note: if you're logging into the PLR system for the first time since it was upgraded in May 2021, please click here to find out how to access your account. If you have any problems you can contact us.

Not yet registered?

If you're wondering whether you're eligible to receive PLR payments, you can check here

To benefit from annual PLR payments please register on our PLR system.

Public Lending Right Calculations and payments - the impact on PLR due to lockdown

The British Library Board is responsible for making an annual recommendation to the DCMS Secretary of State for the Rate Per Loan to be paid to registered authors, illustrators and other contributors to compensate them for the loan of their books from public libraries.

The rate paid for each loan of a registered work is calculated by dividing the PLR fund available (£6.16 million) by the estimated total number of loans of registered works from public libraries in the UK. This is based on loans data collected annually from a sample of UK public libraries, which is then multiplied 'grossed up' using the most recently available annual national library loans data collected by CIPFA from local authorities.

While the basis on which the Rate Per Loan calculation is made is consistent with previous years, the national library loans figures recorded from 1 April 2020 - 31 March 2021 have been affected by the impact of Covid-19. As anticipated, and as indicated last year, this has led to an increase in the Rate Per Loan from 11.26p in 2020/21 to 30.53p in 2021/22.

Whilst this increase in the Rate per Loan will have minimal impact on the overall distribution of earnings, it is likely that some authors will see the temporary increase in the Rate per Loan reflected in their PLR statement and resulting payment.

For more information on why this will be the case please follow this link

Existing PLR Users - Logging in for the first time

If you used PLR before May 2021 your existing account has been upgraded to a British Library Online Account.

The first time that you log on you need to reset your password following these steps;

Go to https://plr.bl.uk choose login with my British Library account and then follow the instructions to reset your password.

When you click 'Request a password reset email', you should enter the email address that was registered on your old PLR account.

Please do not press continue, instead open up the 'Reset your British Library Online account password' email and open the link to choose your new password. Once you've reset your password, you can come back to https://plr.bl.uk/login and access your account.

If you are unable to log on DO NOT create a new British Library account please contact us on 01937 546030 or email us at plrauthorservices@bl.uk

For further information regarding the new system please see our FAQs