Driving abroad for work: what you can still claim

If you take your own car abroad on business, the mileage itself is treated much as it would be at home. Nearly everything else about the trip is treated differently, and that is where the money and the mistakes are.

The mileage

Approved mileage allowance payments apply to business travel in your own vehicle. The rates are not restricted to UK roads — a business journey is a business journey, and the miles you drive in France on the way to a client count towards the same annual total as the miles you drove to get to the ferry.

That includes the 10,000-mile threshold. It is one running total for the tax year across all your own vehicles, wherever they were driven.

The costs that are not mileage

The mileage rate covers running the vehicle. It does not cover:

• Ferries and tunnel crossings
• Foreign tolls and vignettes
• Emissions stickers and city permits
• Parking
• Additional insurance or breakdown cover for the trip

These are claimable separately where the journey is business, exactly as tolls and parking are at home. Keep them attached to the journey rather than in a pile.

Where it gets complicated

Mixed trips. A week abroad that is three days of client work and four days of holiday is not wholly business. The travel there and back has to be apportioned, or may fail entirely if the primary purpose was personal. This is the single most contested area of foreign business travel and the one worth taking advice on.

Subsistence. Meals and accommodation abroad have their own treatment, including HMRC's published overseas scale rates for some countries. That is a separate topic from mileage but usually part of the same trip.

Foreign exchange. Costs paid in another currency need converting at a reasonable rate, applied consistently. Pick a method — the card's rate on the day is usually the cleanest — and use it for the whole trip.

What to record

The same as at home, plus a bit more: date, from, to, purpose, distance, and enough detail to show the business character of the trip if the days were mixed. A calendar of meetings alongside the journey log answers most questions before they are asked.

Milesheet records the drive by GPS wherever you are, so the distance is measured rather than estimated from a map afterwards — which matters more abroad, where the route you actually took and the route you planned are often not the same.

Sources

• HMRC — Travel, mileage and fuel rates and allowances
• HMRC — 490: Employee travel, a tax and NICs guide
• HMRC — Expenses if you're self-employed: vehicles

General information for UK drivers, not tax advice. Mixed business and personal trips abroad are fact-sensitive: take advice.