Free tool
What your business miles are worth
The flat rate went up to 55p a mile from 6 April 2026, for the first ten thousand miles. If you are still working on 45p, you are understating your own expenses.
Travel for work only. Getting from home to a regular place of work does not count.
What you drive
Rates for the 2026 to 2027 tax year, checked against gov.uk on 2026-10-13: 55p for the first 10,000 miles in a car or van, 25p after that, and 24p a mile on a motorcycle at any distance.
Claim as an expense
£6,000.00
The first 10,000 miles are worth 55p each and everything after that 25p, which is why the second band is where the figure flattens out.
How that was worked out
Before you use this figure
These are HMRC’s simplified expenses flat rates for the self employed. You cannot use them for a vehicle you have already claimed capital allowances on, and once you use the flat rate for a vehicle you have to keep using it for that vehicle. Parking and train fares can still be claimed on top.
If you run a limited company and claim mileage from it, that is a different scheme with its own rates. A calculator, not tax advice: the rules are at gov.uk.
The reason people lose money on this
Not the rate. The record. Mileage you did not write down is mileage you cannot claim, and nobody reconstructs a year of driving in April from memory with any accuracy.
A tradesperson doing fifteen thousand business miles a year is claiming over seven thousand pounds of expenses. Guessing at that, in either direction, is not a small error.
Belo knows where you went
Every job has an address and a date in it, because that is how the diary works. Which makes the question of where you drove this year a records question rather than a memory one.