While there is a vast scholarship on redistribution support, we know little about which cash transfers individuals perceive as more redistributive tools. Understanding this is particularly relevant given that universal basic income is increasingly seen as a desirable alternative to existing selective schemes. I explore this question by drawing on original survey data from Finland and Spain. Results suggest that most individuals perceive targeted schemes as more redistributive, albeit with variation across contexts. These perceptions are not predicted by ideology and are unrelated to redistribution support. Crucially, I find that perceptions have an indirect impact on support for redistribution in Finland, where middle-incomes are more supportive of redistribution if they perceive universality to be more redistributive, which offers evidence of an individual-level mechanism of macro-level literature on welfare states (i.e., Korpi and Palme, 1998). These results have far-reaching implications for the study of welfare preferences and the politics of redistribution.