What actually counts as a business mile?

Most underclaimed mileage is not fraud in reverse, it is uncertainty. People are not sure which drives count, so they leave off the ones they could have claimed and add up the rest badly. Here is the line, in plain terms.

The commute does not count

Travel between your home and your permanent workplace is ordinary commuting, and it is never business travel. It does not matter that you left at six in the morning, or that you carried equipment, or that you went in on a Sunday.

A permanent workplace is somewhere you attend regularly for your work, in a way that is not temporary or one-off.

Temporary workplaces do count

Travel to a temporary workplace is business travel, and this is where the claims live. A workplace is temporary if you go there to do a task of limited duration, or for a temporary purpose.

The catch is the 24-month rule. If you expect to spend more than 40% of your working time at a site for more than 24 months, it stops being temporary. Importantly, it stops the moment you expect that to be true, not when the 24 months elapse. A contract extension can retrospectively change what you should have been claiming.

Journeys that usually count

• Driving to a client, a customer, a supplier or a site
• Travelling between two workplaces on the same day
• Going from home directly to a temporary site, if you are not going via the office
• Driving to a conference, training course or trade show your work requires
• A trip to the bank, the post office or the wholesaler for the business, if you are self-employed

Journeys that usually do not

• Home to your usual office, in any circumstances
• A detour for something personal, for the personal part of the distance
• Taking a colleague home after work, unless it is part of a business journey
• Driving somewhere purely social, even with people from work

The awkward middle: home as a workplace

If you genuinely work from home as a requirement of the job, journeys from home to a client can be business travel. But HMRC looks carefully at whether home is a workplace by objective necessity or just where you choose to sit. Working from home three days a week by preference does not turn your Thursday commute into a business mile.

Why the recording matters more than the rules

Two people can drive identical routes and only one of them can claim, because only one of them can say what the journey was for. A date, a start, an end, a distance and a reason is what turns a drive into a claim. Reconstructing that from memory in April is where accuracy goes to die.

That is why Milesheet asks one question and only one: business or personal. It already knows the date, the route, the distance and how long you were stopped. You just tell it what the drive was for, ideally on the same day, when you can still remember.

General information for UK drivers, not tax advice. If your situation is unusual, particularly around temporary workplaces, take proper advice.