Cars, fuel and mileage

There are two ways to claim the costs of your car, motorbike, or bicycle:

• By claiming mileage at a fixed rate. This takes into account all the costs of your vehicle including wear and tear, servicing, repairs, fuel, and insurance.
• By claiming the business share of your vehicle (which could include lease/hire costs, fuel, insurance, and maintenance). If you rent a vehicle for exclusively business purposes eg if travelling for work, then that would be claimable along with the associated fuel. But make sure it's a rental vs a purchase as that has an entirely different tax treatment.

You should only claim the vehicle costs in one way so you don't double claim. You will also generally need to keep the same method for as long as you keep the vehicle. In all cases, you should be in a position to justify what you are deducting.

And whichever method you use, you need to keep evidence for up to 7 years (eg receipts or mileage depending on your method). You can add receipts to bank transactions in untied Pro.

Here's a video.

Claiming mileage is the quickest and simplest way to allocate expenses relating to the use of your personal car, motorbike, or bicycle for business purposes. untied automatically works out the correct rate. You can either do this using the built-in logging or in total at the end of the year as in the linked article.

If you claim the business share of the costs of the vehicle you may want to see the related article on splitting transactions.

We have also linked a specific article on expenses if you ride a bike.

You can typically also claim the non-vehicle related insurance - which may include the hire and reward element (covering taxi, PHV,Uber and simliar drivers for passengers) and for deliveries/business (from Zego and others).

Note that you cannot claim the purchase cost of a car directly - it involves complicated calculations called capital allowances.