Where the Road Starts: Claiming Travel Costs Honestly When Your Office Is Wherever You Park

For the sole trader working from a kitchen table in the morning and a client's boardroom by lunchtime, travel costs can feel like an obvious business expense. Often they are. But the rules about which journeys qualify — and how you record them — are stricter than many people assume, and travel remains one of the areas where HMRC most frequently challenges claims.

This article sets out the position plainly: which journeys count, how to calculate them, and what your records need to show if anyone ever asks.

The Journey Begins at Your Front Door — Usually

The starting point is that travel between your home and a permanent workplace is, in most cases, ordinary commuting and cannot be claimed. For someone who works from a fixed office five days a week, the rule is simple enough.

For the home-based worker, however, the picture changes. If your home is genuinely your business base — the place where you carry out the core of your work — then journeys from home to see clients, attend meetings or visit sites are business travel from the moment you leave the door. HMRC accepts this for people whose home is their principal place of work.

The distinction matters. A journey from home to a client's office is claimable if home is your workplace. The same journey made from a rented studio you also use occasionally may be treated differently. The question the law asks is: where does the business journey begin?

Two Ways to Calculate: Mileage or Actual Costs

Once you have established that a journey is business travel, you have a choice of methods — and the choice depends on your business structure.

Sole traders and partners may use HMRC's simplified mileage rate, currently 45p per mile for the first 10,000 business miles each year and 25p thereafter. This covers running costs, fuel, insurance and wear, so you claim nothing further for the vehicle itself. It is straightforward, defensible and suits anyone who keeps modest records.

Alternatively, you can claim the actual costs of running the vehicle — fuel, servicing, insurance, depreciation — and then restrict the total to the business-use proportion. This requires more bookkeeping but can produce a larger deduction where business mileage is high.

Company directors and employees cannot use the simplified rates for their own claims in the same way. A director driving their own car on company business is normally repaid at HMRC's Approved Mileage Allowance Payments rate — the same 45p and 25p figures — and the company may deduct that reimbursement as an expense. Claims above the approved rate can create a tax charge; claims below it can be offset against salary in some circumstances.

Whichever route you take, the calculation is only as good as the mileage figure behind it. Which brings us to the log.

The Log: What HMRC Actually Expects

A credible mileage record contains, for each journey: the date, the destination, the purpose, and the miles covered. It should be kept contemporaneously — written up at the time or shortly after — rather than reconstructed from memory at year-end.

Reconstruction is where most claims come unstuck. An estimate of "about 4,000 miles, most of it client work" will not survive a compliance check. A spreadsheet or app updated weekly will. If you split your week between a home desk, client premises and the occasional café, describe each journey's purpose in a few words. "Client meeting — Bradford — quarterly review" tells a reader everything they need to know.

Odometer readings at the start and end of the year are worth recording too. They allow the total claimed to be reconciled against the vehicle's actual usage, which is exactly the sort of cross-check an inspector will run.

Mixed Journeys and the Honest Apportionment

Few journeys are purely business. You might combine a client visit with a personal errand, or stop at a café to work between appointments. The rule is proportion: claim the business element only.

A trip that is 30 miles to a client with a 5-mile detour to the shops is claimed as 30 miles. A holiday that includes two days of trade-show attendance is claimed only for the journeys and costs attributable to the show. Where a journey is partly business and partly personal in a way that cannot be separated by miles — a working lunch en route, say — take a reasonable, documented view and be consistent.

Rail, parking and toll fares follow the same logic. Standard-class travel for business purposes is claimable; the taxi home because you fancied an evening out is not. Parking while visiting a client qualifies; a parking fine never does, under any circumstances.

Common Errors Worth Avoiding

Three mistakes recur in practice. First, claiming the full cost of a vehicle used partly for personal trips — the school run is not a business journey, whatever the schedule looks like. Second, using the simplified rate and then also claiming fuel or insurance, which double-counts. Third, keeping no log at all until an accountant requests one in January, by which point the details have blurred.

None of these are usually dishonest. All of them are avoidable.

A Quiet Habit That Pays

Travel claims are not the largest deductions on most returns, but they are among the easiest to get right. Fifteen minutes at the end of each week, updating a log while the journeys are fresh, produces a record that is accurate, defensible and — when the Self Assessment deadline approaches — already done.

If you are unsure whether your home counts as your business base, or whether a particular journey qualifies, it is worth asking before you claim rather than after. A modest claim made correctly is worth far more than an ambitious one made wrongly.