Fuel card and private car - tax?

[mcg_]

I'm employed and rather than a company car I take a car allowance.

With current fuel prices and the crap amount they pay for business mileage (cost me money to drive around for work), I've asked and am being given a fuel card which will be used for all my fuel (private and business).

What will I pay in tax for this benefit? Tried googling but all I find is related to having a company car and fuel card where it seems you get shafted.

Car is a mk7.5 golf r doing circa 10k a year if it makes a difference.

[andyeds1234]

You will pay tax as if it is salary, so if you stick £2k of fuel on the card in a year, it counts as £2k extra salary.
The tax rate you are on will apply to the £2k.

You can claim tax relief on any business mileage, through self assessment though.

[Bungleaio]

Wow you’ve done well to be given a fuel card. We get an allowance and 15p a mile. It’s not easy to make the 15p cover the fuel costs.

No idea on how much tax you will pay but I’d be interested to know.

[mcg_]

andyeds1234 said:

You will pay tax as if it is salary, so if you stick £2k of fuel on the card in a year, it counts as £2k extra salary.
The tax rate you are on will apply to the £2k.

You can claim tax relief on any business mileage, through self assessment though.

Brilliant, thank you.

I've just done a claim for the difference in 45p to 15p (what I currently get for business miles) for the last 4 years. I'll just do that yearly now.

[mcg_]

Bungleaio said:

Wow you’ve done well to be given a fuel card. We get an allowance and 15p a mile. It’s not easy to make the 15p cover the fuel costs.

No idea on how much tax you will pay but I’d be interested to know.

Yes I get 15p too, and it's costing me about 27p a mile in fuel (perhaps a bit less for business miles, but that's an average). Not ideal!

[OldSkoolRS]

Blimey I thought I was hard done by as I currently get 13p a mile for an 'under 2000cc diesel' and I worked out I'd need to get about 70mpg to break even at the current cost of fuel. I manage about 58mpg.

We used to have the option of a fuel card, but the few guys that had one gave it up as it worked out that you'd need to do 500-600 private miles a month (or something around that figure) just to break even: When I'm not at work my company car hardly moves bar the occasional trip to visit family/friends; I do enough driving in work time so I've got sick of driving in my own time...

[blank]

OldSkoolRS said:

We used to have the option of a fuel card, but the few guys that had one gave it up as it worked out that you'd need to do 500-600 private miles a month (or something around that figure) just to break even: When I'm not at work my company car hardly moves bar the occasional trip to visit family/friends; I do enough driving in work time so I've got sick of driving in my own time...

This is pretty common with company cars as you need to do serious mileage to out-weigh the tax.

But a fuel card for a privately owned vehicle is more likely to be a benefit as you'd effectively just get your fuel at a 50-80% discount. Even if you do lots of business miles with no reimbursement it can work out as you can offset the fuel cash value with 45p/25p per business mile.

[Bluemondy]

We've got fuel cards. Just claim personal mileage each month which is deducted at the hmrc rate and has no tax implications.

Could that be an option for the op?