Hemp vs Cannabis: What's the Difference in UK Law?

Hemp and cannabis are the same plant. Botanically there is no line between them, and in UK law there is barely one either: hemp is cannabis grown from approved low-THC varieties under a Home Office licence, and only its stalk, fibre and seed are lawful to use. Everything else about it is still a controlled drug.

That surprises people, because hemp is sold in supermarkets and cannabis is a Class B drug. The two facts sit together because the law never split the plant into two species. It split it into parts, and then gave the Home Office a licence to hand out. So the difference between hemp and cannabis is less a question about botany than about which bits of one plant the state will let a farmer keep.

Are hemp and cannabis different plants?

No. Both are Cannabis sativa. What gets called hemp is a set of varieties bred over centuries for tall stems and lots of seed, with very little THC, the compound that makes cannabis a controlled drug. What gets called cannabis, in the everyday sense, is the same species bred the other way. The difference is chemistry and breeding, not family.

The Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 does not use the word hemp at all. Section 37 defines cannabis as any plant of the genus Cannabis, or any part of one. Then it carves out three things, once they have been separated from the rest of the plant:

• the mature stalk;
• fibre made from the mature stalk;
• the seed.

That carve-out is the whole of hemp's legal existence. Rope, textiles, building material, seed oil and the hemp hearts in a cereal aisle come from those three parts. The leaves and the flowers are not on the list, which means that in law they are cannabis, however low their THC.

Is hemp legal in the UK?

The products made from its stalk, fibre and seed are. Growing the plant is legal only with a licence, and without one it is the same offence as growing any other cannabis. Section 6 of the Act makes it unlawful to cultivate any plant of the genus Cannabis except as allowed by regulations, and the maximum sentence on indictment is 14 years. A field of fibre hemp grown without the paperwork is, on paper, a cannabis farm.

The paperwork is the Home Office's industrial hemp licence. Its licensing factsheet, last updated in December 2025, sets the terms. The seed has to be an approved variety with THC under the legal cap. The licence covers the non-controlled parts only, and the factsheet says plainly that the policy "does not allow for use of 'green' material", meaning leaves and flowers, which have to be retted on site or otherwise lawfully disposed of. It also says the Home Office will not consider applications to produce CBD oils from the controlled parts of the plant, whatever the variety.

There are not many of these licences. In a written answer to Parliament in November 2025, the Home Office put the number in force across Great Britain at 102, mostly held by farms, with a few at universities and research bodies.

Where does the 0.2% THC figure come from?

From a fees regulation, which is about as unglamorous a home for a drug-policy threshold as you could design. The cap is set in regulation 2 of the Misuse of Drugs (Fees) Regulations 2010, which charges a lower licence fee for plants with a THC content not exceeding 0.2% and a much higher one above it. The Home Office's hemp policy borrows that line to decide which varieties count as industrial hemp.

Two consequences follow. First, 0.2% is a rule about which crops get a licence, not a rule about products. As we covered in whether CBD is legal in the UK, a finished product is judged on a different test, one milligram of THC per container, and "below 0.2%" on a label means nothing to it.

Second, the number is due to move, slowly. In October 2024 the ACMD advised that raising the limit to 0.3% would bring benefits that outweigh any increased risk of harm, and the government's response of 11 February 2025 accepted that advice and said it intends to make the legislative change, subject to Parliament. As of this month the regulation on legislation.gov.uk still reads 0.2%. Accepted and done are not the same word.

Is hemp seed oil the same as CBD oil?

No, and the law treats them very differently. Hemp seed oil is pressed from the seed, one of the three parts section 37 lifts out of the definition of cannabis. It carries little or no CBD or THC, and it is sold as a food in the ordinary way, on the shelf next to the rapeseed oil.

CBD oil comes from the parts that are not lifted out. Cannabinoids concentrate in the flowers and leaves, and those are exactly the parts the standard hemp licence requires a farmer to destroy. Producing controlled parts of the plant for a lawful purpose needs a separate cannabis cultivation licence, a different and far more expensive regime that the Home Office reserves for things like pharmaceutical production. So the UK's CBD trade and its hemp farms barely meet. The extract is made from the half of the plant a British hemp farmer is not allowed to keep.

The two bottles can share a shelf and a green leaf on the label. Legally they have almost nothing in common.

What has actually changed for hemp?

The licence, more than the law. The Home Office has eased the administration around it: farm-based licence holders can now plant anywhere within their farm rather than in named fields, and from the 2026 season licences are typically issued for six growing seasons instead of three. Those are real changes for a farmer filling in forms. None of them moves the leaves or the flowers out of the controlled category.

That is the part the hemp industry keeps pushing on, and it is worth being exact about why. In much of Europe, a hemp farmer can use the whole plant within a THC limit. In the UK, the flower is the most valuable part of the crop, and the licence requires it to be destroyed. A campaign to change that is a campaign about hemp policy. It is not, on its own, a campaign to legalise cannabis, though the two get blurred in most coverage of either.

Does hemp being legal mean cannabis is next?

No. Hemp is lawful because of a definition written in 1971 and a licensing scheme built on it, not because policy on cannabis has softened. Cannabis remains a Class B drug, with up to five years for possession and up to fourteen for supply, as set out in our explainer on whether weed is legal in the UK.

The useful thing about hemp, for anyone following legalisation, is what it shows about the machinery. Parliament wrote one definition and let the Home Office license exceptions to it. A legal cannabis market would need something far larger: an Act, a regulator, retail licences, age checks, tax. We sketch what that might involve in what legal weed could look like in the UK. Nobody honest can give you a date for it. High in Hackney follows that second kind of change, the one Parliament has not started, rather than the licensing tweaks that keep hemp farmers busy.

High in Hackney is a waitlist for the day UK law changes for adults. Nothing is sold here and nothing can be until Parliament acts, but the people on the list hear first when it does. Join the waitlist