Buying your own uniform

jlwhite

I am hoping to claim tax relief on the cost of buying uniforms for work, could anyone let me know if there is an amount I can claim for (as there is for washing uniform)? Can you claim for both within one letter to the tax office?

John_Pierpoint

Are you an employee?

Must you have these clothes for your job?

Could you use these clothes outside work?

Do the clothes incorporate a work related logo specific to your business?

jlwhite

I am employed, have to wear the uniform, it is beauty whites with a logo which I would never wear outside work.

John_Pierpoint

Should be tax allowable, as long as the logo is obviously "commercial" not one of those must have designer labels.

If it is a requirement of your job, why does your employer not provide you with the uniform. How is it that you can buy this kit? Would ordinary members of the public buy and wear it? Would you be required to sew on the label yourself ?

You see where I am coming from?

One landmark case, but not automatically applying to persons in a "servant" relationship, was a lady lawyer, who had to buy the full kit including the wig. She protested that she would not be seen dead in the rest of the kit outside court.
She lost.

jlwhite

The logo is the name of the product brand we use, it's definitely not designer and I wouldn't wear it outside of work because it is definitely recognisable as a uniform.

My employer doesn't pay for the uniform, I don't know why we have to pay for it ourselves. The hairdressers in our salon wear black and white usual clothes that they have to supply themselves so I guess it would be seen as unfair if we had our work clothes paid for and they didn't. We have to order them through a special supplier.

I thought it might be the same as if you wash your uniform where there is a set amount of tax relief each year. It sounds like it's not so straight forward.

John_Pierpoint

It is a grey area.
Do your colleagues get away with claiming?

You could have a blunder about in the tax man's manual here
http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/manuals/eimanual/EIM32475.htm

There are examples given of "Air Hostesses" who can claim and bank staff who cannot.

A group photo of you and your colleagues might prove the point to HMRC.

jlwhite

"The essential test is whether the employee would readily be recognised as wearing a uniform by the person in the street"

Mine would definitely be recognised as a uniform. I am the first person at work to try to claim something back. Would I need receipts for the old uniforms if I wanted to reclaim for past years?

Do you think it's better to send this in a seperate letter to the one reclaiming for washing uniform at home?

John_Pierpoint

Yes you would need the receipts.

How often do you need to replace this uniform?
How much does it cost?.
How many years have you failed to make a claim up to now?
Could you claim that it is also "protective" - not quite in the steel capped boots category though.:D

You will note that is says "in the street" rather than "in the shop" but perhaps that is the same as the old phrase "on the Clapham omnibus"

I think I would go for all at once, especially if I could "find" the missing receipts.

Perhaps you will be offered a standard "this covers everything" (except laundry?) deal related to the standard lists for different trades.

At the other end of the process someone might be thinking "here we go - how many more identical claims are we going to get?"

[In a sales job on a quieter day, I got a letter obviously from a school kid aged about 10, I don't know if his mum had put him up to it, but it was brilliant written in his own words and even enclosing a sae.
So I wrote a personalised reply and raided the sample cupboard, for little gimmicks that illustrated the properties of engineering plastics, as well as enclosing a printed "Lasybird"/"Noddy" type pamphlet, that we had already devised for those who needed to look up "plastic" in a dictionary.

Big mistake?

The whole of the rest of the class then wrote in.

They just got the pamphlet]