Employees travel expenses

lumar

Started a new job. Employer was looking for someone in my area to travel to clients in my area and said I would get mileage allowance. After starting, employer said it couldn't pay my mileage from home to place of employment (70 miles away from home). I have to travel to place of employment for training and/or occasional meeting. Is it right that if my contract states my place of work is home based, then employer can pay mileage allowance from home to place of employment? Grateful for advice.

mymatebob

If your base is your home any travel to elsewhere should be paid by your employer.
It may be that your base is officially the "office" and that you are a home worker, in which case you are unlikely to be paid to travel to the office/base

lumar

Thanks. My contract states "home based". So presumably I should be able to claim travel expenses to work place.

jimmo

I am afraid you have 2 separate issues here.
For tax purposes, if your home is genuinely a place of work then your journeys from home to your employer’s premises are travel between workplaces and allowable.
If your employer refuses to pay for those journeys then you are entitled to claim tax relief.
However there is nothing in tax law to force your employer to pay you the expenses.
You will need to look at employment legislation to see if you can force your employer to pay the expenses.

lumar

I would say I will be genuinely working from home - I have works mobile and laptop to make appts with clients at different sites, I have to send information back to work via broadband from home. Its just at the moment, for training, I am at workplace most weekdays, costing a small fortune, especially as I'm part-time. It won't be so bad when required to attend once a week (which will be the case once training completed).

BoGoF

It doesn't matter if your contract states you are home based, that it in itself does not necessarily prevent your office becoming a permanent workplace and if it is a permanent workplace you cannot claim mileage relief. For HMRC purposes a permanent workplace is one that you attend on a regular basis. I would certainly take the view that attending once a week is a regular basis and therefore makes it a permanent workplace.

lumar

Thanks for response. Do you think I have a valid claim for mileage expenses to work because, on my weekly visit, I have to use my car because I couldn't carry all my equipment via public transport? I would normally choose to use public transport, however, I need to use my car when taking work items between home and workplace.

BoGoF

I would say no, the journey (imo) is still travelling to and from a place of employment.

Your employer can still pay you a mileage allowance this would have to be taxed and NIC'd.

lumar

Good news. My employer has agreed to reimburse my travel expenses!!

trevormax

BoGoF wrote: »

For HMRC purposes a permanent workplace is one that you attend on a regular basis. I would certainly take the view that attending once a week is a regular basis and therefore makes it a permanent workplace.

this is only partly correct. For the OP's place of employment to become his permanent work place, he would have to EXPECT to spend more than 40% of his working time at that location for longer than 24 months.

I have capitalised the word expect as it all rests on what your intentions are when you start working at a temporary work place if you can claim mileage allowance.

If you start in a temporary workplace (i.e. its not classed as your main workplace) and you do not expect to work there for longer than 24 months, regardless of how often you work there or how many hours you spend there per week, it can be classed as a temp workplace until the point where you expect to be there for longer than 24 months or when you have actually been there for 24 months, whichever comes first.

Different rules apply when dealing with temporary or fixed term contracts.

Also your employer is not obliged to pay you any travel expenses unless it states in your contract that they will. But you can claim milage allowance from HMRC at 40p/mile for the first 10,000 business miles and then 25p/mile for anything over that, all at whatever rate of tax you pay.

lumar

You sound as though you know a fair bit about this. What are the different rules for temporary and fixed term contracts?