Notebook · 26 June 2026 · 6–7 min read · Alpesh Patel

How I claim my business mileage.

Short answer: if you drive your own car for work, you can claim 55p a mile for the first 10,000 business miles in the tax year (25p a mile after that) — whether you’re a sole trader putting it on your Self Assessment, or a director claiming it back from your own limited company tax-free. The rule is the easy part. The hard part is remembering the small trips — which is how I quietly left around £500 a year on the table.

I always logged the big trips. The conference two hours up the motorway, the client visit that meant an overnight — those went in, because they were obviously worth claiming. It was the small ones I never wrote down: the 15-mile hop to a local client, the monthly networking evening across town. Each felt too minor to fuss over, so I didn’t. “I’ll sort it at year-end” — and year-end became a number I half-guessed in January.

The irony isn’t lost on me: I worked out the real scale of what I’d been missing while building the app meant to stop it happening. It was hundreds of pounds a year. Across the years I’ve been self-employed, that adds up to thousands of pounds — handed quietly to HMRC for the sake of a note I never made.

What actually counts as a business mile

Before any of the money, there’s the question that trips most people up — and quietly cost me the most: which journeys even count?

The clean version is this. A business journey is a trip you make for the work — to a client, a supplier, a meeting, a job, a temporary site. Those count. Your ordinary commute — home to a regular place of work and back — doesn’t. GOV.UK is blunt about it: in its own list of what you can’t claim, alongside parking fines and private trips, sits “travel between home and work”.

That single distinction is where almost all of my missed claims were hiding. The drive to a local client is a business journey. I just never marked it as one, because in the moment it felt indistinguishable from any other short drive. The big obvious trips announced themselves; the small business ones blended into the day. So the rule isn’t complicated — but applying it, trip after trip, all year, is exactly the bit human memory is worst at.

What you’re allowed to claim

If you use your own car for business, HMRC lets you claim a single flat rate per mile that’s designed to cover the whole cost of running it — fuel, servicing, insurance, depreciation, wear — in one tidy figure. You don’t itemise petrol receipts; you count miles. It’s the Approved Mileage Allowance, and from the 2026/27 tax year it’s 55p for your first 10,000 business miles, then 25p a mile above that. (It rose from 45p in April 2026 — worth knowing if you’re still working off the old number.)

The 10,000-mile step matters if you cover serious distance: the rate is more generous on the first chunk and drops to 25p once you pass it, and the counter resets each tax year. For most desk-based business owners doing local visits, you’ll never get near the threshold — which is rather the point of this essay. It’s not the high-mileage drivers who lose out. It’s the low-mileage ones who don’t bother.

How you actually claim depends on how you’re set up:

• Sole trader: you claim it on your Self Assessment. You can use HMRC’s flat per-mile rate (its “simplified expenses”) instead of totting up your actual running costs — usually simpler, and it keeps your fuel-and-servicing paperwork out of it.
• Through your own limited company (this is me): the company pays you for the miles — HMRC calls it a Mileage Allowance Payment — and it’s tax-free in your hands up to that approved amount (miles × the rate), while being a legitimate cost for the company. If the company pays you less than the approved amount, or nothing, you can claim the shortfall back yourself as Mileage Allowance Relief. Pay more than the approved rate and the excess becomes taxable — so the approved rate is the sensible line to sit on.

Either way, the maths underneath is identical: business miles × the rate = what you can claim. Which means the entire game comes down to one unglamorous thing — actually capturing the miles.

The maths I’d been ignoring

Here’s mine, honestly. The trips I never logged weren’t the big ones — they were the routine local runs:

About £500 a year — and not a penny of it from the trips I’d think to claim. All of it from the ones too small to bother with.

Put it as a single ordinary month and it stops feeling abstract: two local client visits and one networking evening is three trips and maybe 75 miles. On its own, that month’s worth about £41 — which is precisely why I waved it away every time. But a year of those unremarkable months is ~£500.

Then do the thing I’d been avoiding and multiply it out — carefully, because the rate hasn’t always been 55p. For most of my time self-employed it was 45p, which on those same miles is nearer £400 a year than £500. So take even just the last ten years at that lower rate and you’re already at around £4,000 — gone, because a 15-mile drive never felt worth a note. I’ve been self-employed far longer than ten years, so the real figure is a good deal worse; I’m keeping the number deliberately conservative.

Why I never claimed it before

Two honest reasons. The first is just that the small trips never felt worth the admin — which is exactly the trap, because individually they aren’t, and collectively they’re five grand.

The second is that the apps I’d tried made the one decision that actually matters — is this trip business or personal? — genuinely tedious, and charged me a monthly subscription for the privilege. So I’d let the habit lapse within a fortnight, and we’re straight back to guessing in January. Paying rent to under-claim is a particular kind of insult.

What HMRC actually wants to see

Here’s the part that turns a claim from “a number you wrote down” into one that holds up: HMRC doesn’t just want the total — it wants to see that the miles behind it were real. In practice that means a record of the journeys: the date, where you went, the business reason, and the distance — the trips themselves, rather than a shoebox of petrol receipts. (One exception: if you’re VAT-registered and reclaiming the VAT on your fuel, you keep fuel receipts too, to cover that VAT — VAT Notice 700/64.)

This is the honest reason an app earns its place, and it isn’t the calculator. The sum is trivial; you could do it on the back of an envelope. The hard, valuable bit is having a quiet, contemporaneous log of every business journey you made, captured at the time, sitting there as evidence months later when you’d otherwise be reconstructing the year from memory and a bank statement.

How I actually do it now

The fix wasn’t discipline. Discipline is the thing that had already failed me for a decade. The fix was not having to remember.

The trip records itself in the background — I don’t open anything, I just drive. And the one decision, business or personal, I make once rather than per-trip: I tag the places I go. My client sites are marked business; home is personal. After that, a drive to a known client site sorts itself into the right column without me touching it.

At year-end there’s no shoebox and no guessing. There’s a figure, with every trip sitting behind it as evidence, ready to drop straight into the company’s books. That, honestly, is the whole reason the app exists in the shape it does. The claim you’ll actually make isn’t the one you intend to make at year-end — it’s the one you didn’t have to think about at all.

If you take one thing from this

Don’t trust yourself to remember. I’m the person who built a mileage tracker and I still couldn’t be relied on to log a 15-mile drive — so I’m fairly sure you’ve got better things to hold in your head too.

Make it automatic. Tag the place once, let every trip after that log itself, and that £500 a year stops being something you meant to claim and quietly becomes something you did.

Common questions

This is general information to help you keep a good record — it isn’t tax advice, and the rules and rates can change. Check current figures on gov.uk, and if your situation is unusual, ask your accountant or HMRC.

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