Country guide · Croatia

Thirty kilometres from the place of work decides which record Croatia wants from you

Two lists, split at thirty kilometres

Croatia does not have one mileage record. It has two, and which one applies is decided by geography rather than by what the journey was for.

The Pravilnik o porezu na dohodak, čl. 7 st. 34, draws the line: "u mjestu rada i/ili do 30 kilometara od mjesta rada (locco vožnja)". Two limbs. Driving inside the place of work is loko vožnja at any distance, and the 30 km is measured from the mjesto rada — not from the employer's seat and not from your home. Beyond it, the journey is a putni nalog.

This matters because the two lists are not versions of each other. Each asks for something the other does not.

The putni nalog — čl. 8 st. 2

"Neovisno u kojem obliku se izdaje, putni nalog kao vjerodostojna isprava sadrži osobito slijedeće podatke: nadnevak izdavanja, ime i prezime osobe koja se upućuje na službeno putovanje, mjesto u koje osoba putuje, svrha putovanja, vrijeme trajanja putovanja, vrijeme kretanja na put, podatke o prijevoznom sredstvu kojim se putuje (ako se putuje automobilom potrebno je navesti marku i registarsku oznaku automobila, početno i završno stanje brojila – kilometar/sat), vrijeme povratka s puta, potpis ovlaštene osobe, obračun troškova, likvidaciju obračuna te izvješće s puta."

So: the date of issue, the traveller's name, where they are going and why, how long it lasts, the time of departure, the car's make and registration plate with the opening and closing odometer reading, the time of return, an authorised signature, the cost calculation, its approval, and a trip report. Receipts attach to it.

One putni nalog is one journey. The make, the plate and the odometer pair belong to that journey, not to a running register — which is why Croatia sits in the same bucket as Germany and the Netherlands rather than the soft bucket its size would suggest.

It no longer has to be paper. "Neovisno u kojem obliku se izdaje" opens the article, and the old opinion requiring it printed and stamped construes a 2005 Pravilnik.

The loko vožnja record — čl. 7 st. 34

Seven items, and the list is a minimum rather than a closed set (naročito):

• Both parties' name and OIB — the employer's and the worker's
• The car's make
• Its registration plate
• The opening and closing odometer reading
• The relacija — the route
• The purpose
• Receipts for the actual costs incurred, parking and the like

No date is prescribed, which is a genuine difference from the putni nalog's nadnevak izdavanja. And nothing here asks for a signature, a cost calculation or a trip report — three things the putni nalog does ask for.

The same 0,50 € either way

St. 34 refers back to st. 2 r.br. 31, and no separate loko row exists. The 0,50 €/km is the figure in both, and the 0,40 circulating on Croatian accounting sites has no basis in the instrument.

The same figure appears a third time pointing the other way: for a company car, čl. 22 st. 3 t. 5.5.1 charges private kilometres to the driver at 0,50 €/km, or applies "1 % nabavne vrijednosti…mjesečno" instead. One number, opposite directions.

It reaches an obrtnik too, and it brings the paperwork with it

čl. 7 is confined by its own words to what "poslodavac ili isplatitelj plaće isplaćuje svojim radnicima", which reads as if a self-employed person is outside it. The bridge is čl. 35 st. 1 t. 6: the same amounts for a taxpayer carrying on an independent activity, "za njih osobno, u visini i na način propisan člankom 7. ovoga Pravilnika".

Na način — in the manner. The cross-reference imports the documentation along with the money, so an obrtnik claiming 0,50 €/km is claiming it under the same record duty.

A paušalni obrt is the exception, and it is complete: ZPD čl. 82 st. 4 — "ne vodi poslovne knjige… osim evidencije o prometu" — with expenses fixed notionally at 85 %. Nothing to add kilometrina to.

Ten years, and a stavak that moved

Opći porezni zakon čl. 66 st. 18 — ten years from the start of the limitation period, and since assessment prescribes "istekom godine u kojoj je nastala porezna obveza", that is ten years from 31 December of the year the obligation arose.

Two traps. The stavak was st. 17 in the NN 115/2016 base text and was renumbered to st. 18 by NN 106/2018 — and OPZ čl. 67 still points readers at "stavkom 17." And the seven-year figure in circulation is dead: the 2015 accounting act gave subsidiary-ledger documents seven years, the 2024 act puts both categories at eleven. A poduzetnik on double-entry books is on that eleven; an obrtnik on income tax sits on the OPZ's ten.

What failure costs

The putni nalog is the vjerodostojna isprava. Without a compliant one, the payment is not a tax-free reimbursement — it is pay.

Why an app rather than a notebook

Nothing above requires software; both lists fit on a form, and the putni nalog is a form. What software changes is which items survive. The kilometres do not go missing. The odometer reading at the moment you set off does, and so does the route of a journey four months ago, and so does the knowledge of whether a particular drive was inside thirty kilometres of the place of work or outside it.

DriveHub records each drive in the background with both endpoints and the odometer at each end, and asks afterwards which were business. Where you have marked your workplace, it measures both ends of a trip against it and files anything inside 30 km as loko vožnja — the PDF marks the row, and the workbook gains a column an accountant can filter on. With no workplace marked, or with an endpoint it could not place, every row stays a putni nalog: that is the safe direction, because a drive wrongly filed as a journey carries detail it did not owe, while one wrongly filed as loko is missing a route, a signature and a cost calculation.

The one item it does not hold is the receipts — "računi za stvarno nastale troškove". There is no attachment store anywhere in it, and the report says on its face that those are yours to keep.

This page quotes the Pravilnik itself and names the article so you can check — čl. 8 st. 2 and čl. 7 st. 34 of the Pravilnik in NN 10/17, not the 26-article one from NN 1/2017 that was repealed weeks later and carries a word-for-word identical sentence. It is not tax advice. It can't account for your circumstances. Where money is involved, ask your knjigovođa — and bring the naloge.