Parking, tolls and charges: what else you can claim

The approved mileage rate covers the cost of running the car: fuel, wear, servicing, insurance, depreciation. It does not cover what you spend on the way. Those are separate, claimable, and routinely forgotten.

Costs that usually go on top

• Parking at the destination of a business journey
• Tolls and bridge charges
• Congestion charge, where the journey was business
• Clean-air and low-emission zone charges for a business trip
• Ferry crossings where they form part of the journey

Each of these is claimable in its own right, in addition to the pence-per-mile. Keep the receipt and note which journey it belongs to.

Costs that do not

• Parking fines and speeding tickets. Never allowable, however the ticket came about.
• Anything on your commute. If the journey is not business travel, its parking is not either.
• Fuel, on top of mileage. You cannot claim the approved rate and the petrol. The rate already includes it. Claiming both is a genuine and expensive error.
• Personal detours. If you paid to park while doing something personal, that is yours.

The evidence problem

Parking is where records fall apart, because so much of it is now a card tap or an app payment with no paper at all. Three months later you have a bank line that says "RingGo" and no idea which site it was or why you were there.

The fix is to capture it at the moment of payment. A photo of the receipt or the machine, attached to the journey it belongs to, does the job. If there is no paper, note the amount and the reason while you are still standing there.

Milesheet keeps these against the trip itself: pick the type, enter the amount, and add a photo if you have one. The photo is copied into the app's own storage, so it survives you clearing out your camera roll. The totals then flow through into your monthly and tax-year statements, and appear as their own section in the exported PDF, clearly separated from the mileage claim.

If you are self-employed

You have a choice per vehicle: simplified expenses (the flat pence-per-mile) or actual costs (a business proportion of fuel, insurance, servicing, capital allowances and so on). You cannot mix the two for the same vehicle, and once you have chosen for a particular car you must keep to that method for as long as you have it.

Parking, tolls and charges sit outside that choice: they are claimable either way.

General information for UK drivers, not tax advice. Check anything unusual with HMRC or your accountant.