Mileage claims and self assessment

[icedchetty]

PS I also posted this on a tax forum but it stumped people on there so I thought I would try here given the higher traffic of car users.

For years I have struggled with finding the correct way to calculate how much I should be claiming on my self assessment when it comes to variable home to work destinations which can vary on a day by day basis. There appears to be no info from HMRC on this and given how many people do this I would have thought they would clear up the guidance.

I have deliberately not given myself a base at work so I can be completely agile and I practically use my home, my car and coffee shops as a base.

My company HQ is a 28 mile home to work distance either way, therefore I have been using this as a figure for practical purposes when making mileage claims for self assessment purposes.

Given that all my travelling is within a 15 mile radius of my HQ and I tend to visit several places within the same day, I treat my first visit as my home to work journey and then claim from my employer all subsequent travel within the area until I leave the last place I visited for home.

This often means my home to work and work to home journey is a little more than 28 miles (home to HQ) by between 2 and 5 miles each way per day. Therefore I claim the additional up to 10 miles per day at the AMAP 45p rate as I don't claim this aspect from my employer.

Does anyone disagree with this or have a better way of doing it? Should I be able to claim the whole home to work area and return each day given I could probably class my home as my base given I also work a couple of days a week at home?

If you read the actual available HMRC guidance, it states that "You cannot claim home to work journeys but you can if its a temporary place of work." This is all that is available.... so what if my home is my base or I have no base? And what constitutes as a temporary place of work? If I claimed my annual home to work and return journeys each day I would be claiming about 8,000 miles x £0.45 = £3,600 expense on my self assessment. However I am currently just claiming the surplus circa 10 miles per day so 1,000 miles x £0.45 = £450 expenses.

Thanks

[Sheepshanks]

I haven’t looked at this for a few years but My reading of HMRC stuff was you can claim the whole milage, less any amount of money you employer gives. You can even claim for home to HQ, as long as your stop there is incidental to the business journey.

[Eric Mc]

Where is your employer based?
Do you ever travel there?
If so, how often?

[Who_Goes_Blue]

If it helps we have several employed project design engineers who are termed to be home based staff. They are predominantly on customer sites or working from home, occasionally they are in the office. We pay mileage on all the work related travel they do, including coming into the office. This has been like this for decades without issue.
It may help if your employment contract specifically states you main place of work is your home.

[devnull]

Who_Goes_Blue said:

If it helps we have several employed project design engineers who are termed to be home based staff. They are predominantly on customer sites or working from home, occasionally they are in the office. We pay mileage on all the work related travel they do, including coming into the office. This has been like this for decades without issue.
It may help if your employment contract specifically states you main place of work is your home.

This is my situation. Contract is work from home, and where i am is highly variable. I might not ever got to HQ for months, I might work at home for weeks at a time, or i might do home, customer or HQ all week. Either way I claim for any business related travel as soon as I step outside the door.

[icedchetty]

devnull said:

Who_Goes_Blue said:

If it helps we have several employed project design engineers who are termed to be home based staff. They are predominantly on customer sites or working from home, occasionally they are in the office. We pay mileage on all the work related travel they do, including coming into the office. This has been like this for decades without issue.
It may help if your employment contract specifically states you main place of work is your home.

This is my situation. Contract is work from home, and where i am is highly variable. I might not ever got to HQ for months, I might work at home for weeks at a time, or i might do home, customer or HQ all week. Either way I claim for any business related travel as soon as I step outside the door.

I am similar to this, I may choose to go into work but I dont have to and often just work from home or wherever I fancy. Now my home to usual place of work is 56 miles per day, assuming I travel 3 times per week this would equate to a self assessment submission of 8,000 miles x 0.45p = £3,600 which at 40% tax would reduce my liability by £1,440.

A person has responded to me on the tax forum I posted on and they said HMRC would constitute the area I generally travel to on a regular basis as my place of work, they would disregard "base" and class that as my normal commute. They also said having a contract that states my place of work is my home is also irrelevant as its down to where I regularly travel on a frequent basis.

I guess there is no hard and fast rule here, its more down to intention and what is fair