Mileage log requirements in the United Kingdom

What your records have to contain to survive a check by HMRC, and the rate DriveHub applies.

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Updated 5 Oct 2026

Country

The rate

£0.55 per mile

First 10,000 miles per year; £0.25 per mile after that.

In force from 6 April 2026.

Employer's car, employee pays the fuel — HMRC advisory fuel rates, per mile

Petrol, 1400cc or less: £0.14
Petrol, 1401cc to 2000cc: £0.17
Petrol, over 2000cc: £0.27
Diesel, 1600cc or less: £0.15
Diesel, 1601cc to 2000cc: £0.16
Diesel, over 2000cc: £0.22
LPG, 1400cc or less: £0.11
LPG, 1401cc to 2000cc: £0.13
LPG, over 2000cc: £0.20
Fully electric, charged at home: £0.07
Fully electric, charged in public: £0.15

In force from 1 September 2026; HMRC revises them every quarter, and DriveHub prices each trip at the quarter it was driven in.

The rule that governs it

Approved Mileage Allowance Payments; no prescribed logbook form.

What every trip has to record

Per journey: the date
the start point and destination (postcodes are what HMRC asks to see)
the distance
the reason for the journey

Prefer to keep it by hand? A blank log with these fields: CSV · PDF.

How long to keep them

The mileage record has three different answers, and none of them is the six years often quoted — that is the VAT rule, VATA 1994 Sch. 11 para. 6:

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): until at least "the first anniversary of the 31st January next following the year of assessment" — 31 January 2029 for 2026-27. HMRC's guides round it to "at least 22 months after the end of the tax year" (HMRC 490, 12.1; gov.uk Keeping your pay and tax records, whose example is a 2024-25 return kept "until at least the end of January 2027"). Where a return is required by a notice given on or before that day, s. 12B(1)(b) extends it to whichever is later: the day any enquiry into the return is completed, or the day HMRC can no longer open one.
An employer's PAYE records — three years from the end of the tax year.

And a contractor filing through their own limited company has two more: Companies Act 2006 s. 388(4)(a), three years for a private company's accounting records, and — the longer one, which governs — FA 1998 Sch. 18 para. 21(2A)(a), until "the sixth anniversary of the end of the period for which the company may be required to deliver a company tax return", extended by an open enquiry (para. 21(3)).

What it costs to get wrong

The relief is refused for the journeys that cannot be evidenced. HMRC 490, 12.10: "Employees must be able to substantiate the statements they make. Where tax has been underpaid because an employee has had tax relief to which they were not entitled, or the amount of tax relief has been overstated, we will seek to recover from the employee the tax lost, together with interest and, where appropriate, penalties and a surcharge."

Where this comes from

The requirements above are quoted from HMRC. DriveHub re-checks these, and the rate, against the authority's own pages; this page is built from that record.

DriveHub records this automatically. It tracks each drive in the background and keeps the start and end, the distance and the route. Tracking and the missing-drive check are free; the report in the shape a tax office expects is part of DriveHub Pro.