Notebook · 17 June 2026 · 7–8 min read · Alpesh Patel

How to choose a UK mileage tracker app.

Search for the best UK mileage tracker and you’ll get a dozen “top 10” lists, most of them ranking whoever pays the affiliate fee. That’s not much help when it’s your tax claim on the line. So here’s the honest version — the six things that actually matter when you pick one, written so you can judge any app for yourself, ours included.

1Does it use the right UK rate — and keep it current?

A surprising number of popular trackers are built US-first and bolt the UK on afterwards. The UK has its own approved rate — HMRC’s Approved Mileage Allowance Payments, or AMAP — and its own two-band structure: a higher rate for the first 10,000 business miles in the tax year, and a lower one for every mile above that. So 12,000 business miles isn’t one sum; it’s 10,000 at the higher rate plus 2,000 at the lower. An app that doesn’t understand that split will quietly over- or under-state your claim.

The rates also change — usually at a Budget — and motorcycles and bicycles have their own. So the tell of a good tracker is simple: does it show pounds, not dollars, and does it state which tax year its figures are for? If it can’t tell you that, it can’t be trusted with the arithmetic.

2Can it actually capture a drive — reliably?

This is the one that quietly fails. A tracker that needs you to remember to open it, or that drops a drive when the phone is asleep or out of signal, isn’t saving you anything — you’ll still be reconstructing journeys from memory at tax time, which is exactly the chore the app was meant to remove.

The questions worth asking before you commit: does it start automatically when you begin driving? Does it keep recording if the app is closed, backgrounded, or killed by the phone to save battery? Does it work fully offline, in a tunnel or a signal blackspot? And — the honest one almost nobody answers — how do they test that it’s accurate? An app that publishes its accuracy method is telling you something an app that just says “never miss a drive” on a marketing page isn’t.

3Does it give you a record HMRC will actually accept?

A big total-mileage number is not a claim. What HMRC wants is a log of individual journeys — for each one: the date, where you went (start and end, postcodes if you’re claiming as an employee), why it was business, and the miles. The log is meant to be contemporaneous: recorded as you go, not stitched together from memory the week before the deadline.

A good tracker produces exactly that, as a clean export — PDF or CSV — you could hand to an accountant or put in front of an inspector without apology. A weak one gives you a headline figure with nothing behind it. So before you settle on an app, ask to see a sample export. If they won’t show you one, that tells you what the record looks like.

4What will it cost you — over time?

Most trackers are subscriptions, and the monthly price is designed to hide the real number. A typical one runs around £85 a year. The honest way to read that is to multiply it by how long you’ll actually use it:

Neither model is automatically right — a subscription that ships constant real improvements can earn its keep. But for what is, at heart, a small utility that doesn’t change much once it works, you should do the multiplication before you tap subscribe, not after.

A subscription hides the real price in the monthly. Do the multiplication before you tap subscribe, not after.

5What does it ask for — and do with your data?

Your mileage log is a quiet map of where you go, when, and how often. Worth a moment, then, on what the app does with it. Does it make you create an account before you can record a single trip? Does it ask for permissions it doesn’t obviously need — contacts, advertising identifiers — or carry third-party trackers that follow you across other apps? Does it sell or share your data, and is that buried in a privacy policy you’ll never read?

The most privacy-respecting answer is the boring one: no account, nothing sold, the records living on your own phone. It’s worth the few seconds it takes to check, because this is the one thing you can’t claw back later.

6Does it do the VAT — and hand your accountant a finished figure?

If you’re VAT-registered, there’s more to a mileage claim than the AMAP rate. You can reclaim the VAT on the fuel portion of your business miles, worked out from HMRC’s Advisory Fuel Rates — which vary by engine size and fuel type, and change quarterly. Most trackers stop at the mileage and leave that to your accountant to reconstruct from a shoebox of receipts.

The ones worth having do the fuel-VAT sub-calculation for you — per vehicle, at the right rate for the quarter — so your accountant or bookkeeper opens a clean, ready figure instead of an afternoon’s work. It’s the difference between handing them a number and handing them a finished claim — and it’s the thing they’ll quietly thank you for.

Where we stand — honestly

That’s the checklist we’re building Keepwright’s Mileage Tracker against: UK-native HMRC rates kept current, capture we test openly, an export shaped the way HMRC asks, the VAT-on-fuel worked out so your accountant doesn’t have to, pay-once rather than a subscription, and no account to create. It’s in development — we’re not going to tell you it’s the best when you can’t download it yet. But the checklist holds for whoever you choose, and we’d rather you used it than took a listicle’s word for it.

Common questions

General information, not tax advice; rates and rules change — check current figures on gov.uk.

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