Self-Employed and Driving for Work? You're Probably Leaving Money on the Table

If you're self-employed in the UK and you drive for work, there's a very good chance you're not claiming everything you're entitled to. You might be underestimating your mileage. You might not realise you can backdate claims. Or you might simply find the whole process too tedious to bother with.

You're not alone — but it's costing you real money.

The Scale of What's Going Unclaimed

According to RIFT Tax Refunds, nearly £200 million in mileage tax relief goes unclaimed by UK workers every single year. That's not a rounding error. That's hundreds of pounds per person, year after year, simply because people don't track their miles or don't know the rules.

A survey by Klippa found that 56% of UK drivers are unfamiliar with HMRC's regulations around business mileage reimbursement. More than half the people driving for work don't fully understand what they can claim.

And it gets worse. Research by Soldo found that roughly one in five employees admits to inaccurate expense claims — not necessarily through dishonesty, but because manual tracking methods (scribbled notebooks, memory-based estimates, vague spreadsheets) make precision almost impossible.

For the self-employed, the problem is amplified. There's no employer handling reimbursement. No payroll team flagging underclaims. It's entirely on you to track, calculate, and report — and if you don't, HMRC won't chase you to give you money back.

What You Can Actually Claim

HMRC allows self-employed individuals to claim business mileage as an allowable expense using the simplified expenses method. The rates for the 2026/27 tax year are:

• 45p per mile for the first 10,000 business miles
• 25p per mile for every mile after that
• 24p per mile for motorcycles
• 20p per mile for bicycles
• 5p per mile extra for each business passenger you carry

These rates are designed to cover everything: fuel, insurance, servicing, depreciation, road tax, and wear and tear. You don't need to keep individual fuel receipts or calculate actual running costs — just multiply your business miles by the rate.

These HMRC-approved mileage rates have remained unchanged since 2011. That's over 13 years at the same rate, despite significant increases in fuel prices and vehicle running costs during that period.

What Counts as a Business Journey?

HMRC is clear on what qualifies. Business mileage includes:

• Travelling to meet clients or customers
• Visiting suppliers
• Travelling between work locations
• Going to a temporary workplace (anywhere you work for less than 24 months)
• Attending training courses or conferences

What doesn't count is your regular commute — driving from home to your usual place of work. Even if you work from home, trips to a regular co-working space or your own shop premises typically don't qualify.

Let's Put Real Numbers on This

Imagine you're a self-employed consultant based in the Midlands. You visit clients three times a week, averaging 40 miles per round trip. That's roughly 120 miles per week, or 6,240 miles per year.

At 45p per mile, your annual mileage claim would be £2,808 — deducted directly from your taxable profit.

If you're a basic-rate taxpayer (20%), that's a tax saving of £561.60. If you're a higher-rate taxpayer (40%), it's £1,123.20 back in your pocket.

Now consider that you can backdate claims for up to four previous tax years. If you've been driving for work and not claiming, you could be owed several thousand pounds in total.

And those are conservative numbers. Many tradespeople, care workers, sales reps, and mobile professionals drive significantly more than 6,000 miles per year for business.

Why People Don't Claim (and Why That Needs to Change)

The reasons tend to be the same: the tracking feels like a chore, the rules seem complicated, and by the time tax season arrives, the records are incomplete or non-existent.

HMRC requires specific records to support a mileage claim. At a minimum, you need:

• The date of each business journey
• The start and end locations
• The purpose of the trip
• The total miles driven

Maintaining this manually — whether in a notebook, spreadsheet, or back-of-envelope system — is tedious enough that most people give up, estimate, or skip it entirely. And estimates carry risk: HMRC can penalise inaccurate records with fines of up to £3,000 per incorrect entry.

How Trippi Solves This

Trippi was built specifically for this problem. If your work appointments are in your Google or Microsoft Calendar with locations attached, Trippi does the rest.

It reads your calendar events, calculates the mileage between your base location and each destination using HMRC-approved rates, and generates a complete, compliant mileage log — automatically.

No GPS running in the background. No manual logging. No end-of-year scramble to reconstruct months of driving from memory.

At tax time, you export your Trippi report, hand it to your accountant (or enter it into your Self Assessment return), and claim what you're rightfully owed.

The Bottom Line

If you're self-employed and driving for business in the UK, mileage is one of the easiest and most valuable expenses you can claim. The rates are generous, the rules are straightforward, and with the right tool, the tracking is effortless.

Leaving £500, £1,000, or even £2,000+ unclaimed each year isn't just an inconvenience. It's money that could be reinvested in your business, put towards equipment, or simply kept as earnings you've already worked hard for.

Stop guessing. Start tracking. And claim every mile you're owed.

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Trippi connects to your Google or Microsoft calendar and automatically calculates your HMRC-compliant business mileage. Free to use. Built for UK self-employed drivers.

Sources: RIFT Tax Refunds (unclaimed relief figures), Klippa/YouGov (56% awareness statistic), Soldo Credit Card (expense accuracy research), HMRC GOV.UK (mileage rates and rules), AccountingPeople.co.uk (claiming mileage allowance guide). All figures verified as of March 2026.