MilometryIf you work from home, where does business travel start?
Whether your house counts as a workplace, when the drive to the office becomes claimable, and why hybrid working makes this harder rather than easier.
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Hybrid working broke a rule that used to be simple. When everyone went to an office five days a week, home was home and the office was the permanent workplace. Now the line moves, and a lot of people are guessing. This post covers the rules for employees. Where a journey is business travel, your employer can pay you for it tax free up to the approved amount, and if they pay less you can claim tax relief on the shortfall against your own Income Tax (Mileage Allowance Relief).
The default answer
Your home is not automatically a workplace just because you work in it. HMRC's starting position is that where you live is a personal choice, and travel from it to your employer's premises is ordinary commuting, not claimable, whether you go five days a week or one. The courts agreed in the leading case, where a civil servant on a voluntary homeworking scheme worked at home four days a week and still could not claim his weekly trip to the office.
That is the answer most hybrid workers do not want, and it is the answer that applies to most of them.
When home genuinely is a workplace
It can be, but the bar is high, and for the drive to the office there are two hurdles. First, working at home has to be an objective requirement of the job, doing real duties of the job there, rather than a personal preference or an employer being relaxed about it. Second, HMRC's guidance says that even then, travel from home to another permanent workplace only qualifies if where you live is itself dictated by the job.
"My employer lets me work from home three days a week" does not clear either. A role that requires you to live and work in a particular area, far from any office, is the kind of case that can.
Even where both are met, the relief only applies on days when home is a workplace. HMRC's example is someone required to work at home every Friday: the trip to the office Monday to Thursday is commuting, but an unexpected call into the office on a Friday is travel between two workplaces.
The trap in the middle
A common and costly hybrid mistake is treating office days as claimable because they are occasional. An office you are based at does not stop being a permanent workplace because you go in less often: HMRC's guidance says even fortnightly attendance can be "regular". (The longer the gap between visits, the more room there is for a particular visit to be for a temporary purpose, but that turns on the facts of each visit.)
Equally, people under-claim: a drive from home straight to a client or temporary site is business travel whether or not you work from home, and often goes unrecorded because it did not feel like a "work trip". The one exception is a trip that is, for practical purposes, the same journey as your commute.
The hybrid cases, resolved
| Journey | Claimable? |
|---|---|
| Home → office, 5 days a week | No, commuting |
| Home → office, once a fortnight | Usually no, still a permanent workplace |
| Home → client, on a home-working day | Yes, unless substantially your usual commute |
| Home → office → client → home | Leg 1 no, legs 2 and 3 yes |
| Home → temporary project site | Yes, subject to the 24-month rule |
| Home → coworking space the employer pays for | Depends whether it is a permanent workplace |
| Home → office on a day you were not required in | No, commuting |
| Home → office, on a day the job requires you to work at home (rare, see above) | Possibly, travel between two workplaces |
Triangular journeys
Home → office → client → home is three legs and they are not all the same.
- Home to office: commuting, not claimable
- Office to client: business travel, claimable
- Client to home: usually claimable, though if you detour somewhere personal on the way, that part is not
The practical answer is to record all of it and classify each leg for what it was, rather than deciding at the end of the month that the whole day was or was not "business".
Why the record helps here more than anywhere
This is precisely the area where a claim gets challenged, because the facts vary person to person and month to month. A contemporaneous log, recorded on the day rather than reconstructed in April, is the difference between a defensible position and an argument.
Milometry records each leg separately, so a day like the one above arrives as three journeys you can sort individually. Tag home as Home and the office as Workplace and the commuting legs are recognised and kept out of the claim automatically, while still sitting in your records where you can see them.
Sources
- 490: Tax and National Insurance contributions for employee travel (HMRC)
- Employment Income Manual EIM32075: temporary workplace (HMRC)
- Employment Income Manual EIM32080: the 24-month rule (HMRC)
- Employment Income Manual EIM32070: regular attendance (HMRC)
- Employment Income Manual EIM32170: employees who work at home (HMRC)
- Employment Income Manual EIM32173: example, home a workplace on Fridays (HMRC)
- Employment Income Manual EIM32370: travel from home where it is a place of work (HMRC)
- Employment Income Manual EIM32374: Kirkwood v Evans (HMRC)
- Safeguards against abuse of employee travel tax relief (490: Chapter 4) (HMRC)
- Income Tax (Earnings and Pensions) Act 2003, section 339 (legislation.gov.uk)
- Claim tax relief for your job expenses: vehicles you use for work (HMRC)
General information for UK drivers, not tax advice. Whether a home qualifies as a workplace is fact-specific: if you are relying on it, get it confirmed.
