Claiming travel expenses is one of the most common questions we hear from clients — and one of the most misunderstood. A lot of business owners either overclaim (not realising that the daily commute doesn’t count) or underclaim (not knowing they can use the mileage rate for their own car rather than tracking every petrol receipt).

The good news is that the rules are actually quite consistent. HMRC applies a straightforward test: was the travel wholly and exclusively for business? If yes, you can claim it. If the journey had a personal element, or if it’s your regular commute to a fixed workplace, it almost certainly won’t qualify. From April 2026, the approved mileage rate also increased for the first time in 15 years — so if you’re using your own vehicle for work, it’s worth making sure you’re claiming correctly.

Here’s how we think about it, and what to keep in mind when putting together your expenses.

Whether you’re a sole trader, a limited company director, or an employee, the starting point is always the same. A business travel expense is allowable if it was incurred wholly, exclusively, and — for employees and directors — necessarily for the performance of your duties.

That last word, ‘necessarily’, is worth pausing on. For directors and employees, HMRC expects the travel to be objectively required for the job, not just convenient or preferred. For sole traders, the test is slightly different: the journey just needs to be wholly and exclusively for the trade.

In practical terms, this means:

• Visiting a client’s premises: allowable.
• Attending a training course relevant to your work: generally allowable.
• Travelling between two different workplaces: allowable.
• Your regular journey from home to your main office or permanent workplace: not allowable. This is commuting, and HMRC draws a firm line here regardless of how far you travel or how inconvenient it is.

The commuting rule catches a lot of people out. If you have a fixed, regular workplace — even if it’s a client site you visit every day for several months — HMRC may treat it as a permanent workplace after a point, which means the travel there stops being claimable. The temporary workplace rules are nuanced, and worth checking if your pattern of work changes regularly.

From April 2026, the approved mileage allowance payment (AMAP) rate for cars and vans increased from 45p to 55p per mile for the first 10,000 business miles in the tax year. After 10,000 miles, the rate drops to 25p per mile. This is the first time the rate has been uprated in 15 years, and it’s a meaningful change.

If you use your own car for business travel and your employer or your own limited company reimburses you at or below these rates, there’s no tax or National Insurance to pay on those payments. If you’re a sole trader, you can use the same figures to calculate your mileage deduction on your Self Assessment return instead of claiming actual vehicle costs.

To put some numbers on it: someone doing 6,000 business miles a year would now receive or claim £330 more annually than under the old rate — a tangible difference worth having.

A few things to be aware of:

• If you carry fellow employees in your own vehicle for business purposes, you can also claim an additional 5p per passenger per business mile.
• You need to keep a mileage log. HMRC can ask for evidence of every journey — date, destination, purpose, and miles travelled. A simple spreadsheet or a mileage tracking app works fine.
• If your employer reimburses you at less than the approved rate, you can claim the difference as a deduction on your Self Assessment return.

Travel costs are rarely just the journey. If a business trip involves an overnight stay, or if you’re away from your usual place of work for a long enough period, you can also claim subsistence — meals and accommodation — provided the expenses are reasonable and genuinely business-related.

For overnight accommodation, the guideline rates HMRC references for major UK cities were updated from March 2026. For cities including Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds, and Newcastle, the benchmark rate is now £120 per person per night inclusive of VAT. This doesn’t mean you’re limited to exactly that figure, but it gives a useful reference point for what HMRC considers reasonable.

On top of accommodation, there’s a small allowance for incidental overnight expenses — things like phone calls home or a newspaper. This currently stands at £5 per night for UK travel. It’s modest, but it’s a real allowance that’s easy to miss.

For meals, the position is less prescriptive. HMRC doesn’t publish a flat meal rate for most business travellers, so the test comes back to whether the expense was reasonable and necessary given the nature of the trip. A working lunch with a client is in different territory to dinner at a Michelin-starred restaurant — use your judgment, and keep receipts for everything.

One thing we always emphasise to clients: receipts are a legal requirement, not a formality. HMRC can open an enquiry at any point, and without documentation, even a genuine expense can be disallowed.

If you run a limited company, you have two main options for handling business travel: the company pays directly, or you pay personally and reclaim it as an expense through your director’s loan account or expense claim.

Either way, the same ‘wholly and exclusively’ test applies. The company can only deduct costs that relate to genuine business activity. That means your commute from home to your registered office remains off the table — even if you’re also the sole director and shareholder.

One area worth highlighting for directors is the distinction between your home and a temporary workplace. If you regularly work from home and travel to client sites or other offices, those journeys may well be claimable — your home can, in certain circumstances, be treated as a place of work. This intersects with using your home as an office, which has its own set of rules around what you can claim.

For limited company owners, getting the expense categories right also matters at year-end — your accountant needs to distinguish between reimbursed expenses (which pass through the company) and benefits in kind (which may create a P11D liability). Business travel reimbursed at HMRC’s approved rates is generally straightforward. Travel that strays outside those parameters needs more careful handling.