Country guide · United Kingdom

HMRC asks for postcodes at both ends, and for a separate mileage log per employment

What the log has to show

gov.uk, on claiming tax relief for vehicles you use for work: "When you claim, you must send HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) copies of your mileage logs. These logs must include: the reason for every journey; the postcode for the start point of every journey; the postcode for the end point of every journey."

Postcodes, at both ends, per journey. Not a town, not a client name. Plus the date and the distance, logged in a timely, chronological and orderly way — and estimating is not accepted. There is no prescribed form; there is a prescribed content, and it is more specific than "keep a record" suggests.

One log per employment

The same page: "If you are claiming for more than one employment, you must send a copy of your mileage log for each."

That is not only filing hygiene, because the band follows it. Approved Mileage Allowance Payments run at 55p a mile for the first 10,000 miles and 25p after — and the 10,000 is counted per employment. A filer with two jobs who keeps one running total drops to 25p halfway through what each employment allows.

ITEPA s 235 merges only associated employments. Two jobs at connected employers are one band in law and would be two here, which is a case to name one employer for both rather than let the arithmetic run separately.

A sole trader counts the band over their own period of account where they have one (ITTOIA s 94F(3)), not over the tax year.

The 5p passenger payment is an exemption, not a relief

HMRC pays 5p a mile on top for each colleague carried on a business journey, tax-free and with nothing to report — and no name is required, unlike Norway.

But s 233 is an exemption, which means it removes a charge on a payment rather than creating a claim. EIM31410 says it outright: an employee whose employer does not pay has nothing to claim back. And ITTOIA ss 94D/94F give the self-employed no per-head figure at all.

So the question is not how many passengers you carried. It is whether your employer operates the scheme.

One case is easy to get wrong in the other direction: s 233(1) exempts approved passenger payments "for the use of a car or van (whether or not it is a company vehicle)". A company-car driver who is reimbursed for fuel is inside the exemption. A company-car driver whose fuel is provided is not, because s 233(1)(a) requires that "the employee receives mileage allowance payments", and they receive none.

How long to keep it — and it is not six years

The six years in general circulation is the VAT rule, VATA 1994 Sch. 11 para. 6. A mileage record has three different answers and none of them is six:

• Self-employed — TMA 1970 s. 12B(2)(a): at least five years after the 31 January submission deadline for the relevant tax year. The anchor is a filing deadline, which no "N years after the trip" phrasing can express.
• Employee — TMA 1970 s. 12B(2)(b): at least 22 months after the end of the tax year.
• An employer's PAYE records — three years from the end of the tax year.

And a contractor filing through their own limited company has a fourth: Companies Act 2006 s. 388(4)(a), three years.

What failure costs

The relief is refused for the journeys that cannot be evidenced. Not the year — the journeys; which is why a record with holes in it costs exactly the size of its holes.

Why an app rather than a notebook

Nothing above requires software; a notebook with a date, two postcodes, a distance and a reason satisfies HMRC. What software changes is which of the five survives a tax year.

The mileage is never what goes missing. The postcode you set off from goes missing — because at the time you knew where you were and had no reason to write it down — and so does the reason for one journey among three hundred, and the word timely, which is the difference between a record and a reconstruction.

DriveHub records each drive in the background with both endpoints and the distance, and asks afterwards which were work. The report prints the date, both addresses, the distance and your own reason per journey, counts the 10,000-mile band per employment, and can be scoped to one employment — which is what HMRC's instruction to send a log for each one asks for.

Where you say what your employer pays per mile, it also subtracts it: the Mileage Allowance Relief of ITEPA s 231, comparing HMRC's banded approved amount with what each journey's own employer actually paid. A journey with no stated payment is left out of that comparison rather than counted as paid nothing.

This page states what HMRC and the legislation say, and cites them so you can check. It is not tax advice. It can't account for your circumstances. Where money is involved, ask your accountant — and bring the logs.