Mileage rates for UK businesses: HMRC policy, tracking, and how to reduce claims errors

Most mileage claim errors don't look like errors when they happen. A flat 45p rate applied all year, a home-to-client journey that started from the office, a company car driver claiming the same rate as everyone else. Each one feels routine until HMRC reviews your records and the P11D liability lands. For mid-market finance teams processing hundreds of expense claims a month, the risk is these small, systematic errors compounding across a full tax year.

This is general guidance for UK finance teams, not tax advice. Mileage treatment depends on your specific circumstances, so consult a qualified tax adviser before acting on the rules covered here.

Why your mileage policy deserves more attention in 2026

AMAP rates haven't changed since April 2011. Over that period, the cost of motoring has risen by 39%, fuel by 43%, and vehicle maintenance by 38%, according to union research cited in Parliament's briefing on mileage allowance payments. During a Commons debate in March 2026, MPs highlighted that the true cost of running a vehicle is now around 67p per mile, well above the 45p reimbursement ceiling.

The government has since confirmed it will review AMAP rates ahead of a future Budget, reported by both ICAEW and CIPP. A rate change would affect every mileage policy, payroll configuration, and expense management system in your organisation.

That review makes this a good time to audit your existing mileage policy. Whether rates change or not, the compliance obligations around record-keeping, the 10,000-mile threshold, and the business-versus-commuting distinction remain unchanged. Those are the areas where most mid-market finance teams are exposed. The difficulty is getting 150 employees to apply them correctly on every claim, every week, without your finance team acting as a manual safety net.

Current AMAP rates for 2026: What you can reimburse tax-free

For the 2025 to 2026 tax year, you can reimburse employees who use their own vehicles for business travel at 45p per mile for the first 10,000 business miles, then 25p per mile after that. These rates are called Approved Mileage Allowance Payments (AMAPs). HMRC sets them out under sections 229 to 236 of the Income Tax (Earnings and Pensions) Act 2003.

The AMAP rate is all-inclusive, covering fuel, servicing, insurance, and depreciation. Under HMRC Booklet 490, Chapter 5, HMRC's employee travel tax guide, the approved rate replaces all such costs. You can't reimburse additional actual vehicle costs on top of the statutory rate.

What happens when you pay above AMAP rates

If you reimburse more than the approved amount, the excess is charged to income tax. You need to process it through Pay As You Earn (PAYE) or report it on form P11D. The excess also triggers Class 1A National Insurance contributions. You can't bundle the excess into a PAYE Settlement Agreement (PSA), which is the route normally used for minor or irregular employee benefits.

The P11D filing deadline is 6 July following the end of the tax year, with Class 1A NIC payment due by 19 July (cheque) or 22 July (electronic). Miss either date and you'll face interest charges and potential penalties. A small payroll setup mistake turns into a July fire drill, right when your team is already running month-end close.

What happens when you pay below AMAP rates

Nothing from your side. You don't need to include it on P11D. But your employees can claim the shortfall as Mileage Allowance Relief via Self Assessment (box 17 of the SA102 employment pages) or, for simpler cases, by submitting a P87 form directly. A well-drafted expense policy should tell employees about this right, since many don't realise the relief exists.

The 10,000-mile threshold: Where payroll systems get it wrong

Payroll systems trip at this threshold because National Insurance doesn't follow the same rules as income tax. For income tax, the 45p rate drops to 25p after the first 10,000 business miles. For National Insurance, the 45p rate applies to every business mile, with no drop at the threshold. Your payroll system needs to apply this split correctly for both, though the distinction isn't clearly reflected in much of the published guidance.

If you haven't explicitly checked whether your payroll system handles tax and NIC separately at the threshold, a 15-minute audit could save you a much larger headache at year-end. The cost of getting it wrong scales with every high-mileage employee on your books.

Employees who hold more than one role across associated businesses, such as a parent company and a subsidiary, face an additional complication. If an employee receives mileage payments from both, their mileage must be added up across all roles to determine when the 10,000-mile threshold is reached. Does your current system track that? If not, it should definitely go on your to-do list.

Business travel vs. ordinary commuting: The most audit-sensitive area

The classification that comes up most in HMRC compliance reviews is the line between business travel and ordinary commuting. A journey between an employee's home and their permanent workplace is always commuting, not business travel, and not reimbursable tax-free. Reimbursing ordinary commuting, even at the AMAP rate, counts as taxable earnings subject to tax and National Insurance.

The permanent workplace rule

A permanent workplace is the place an employee regularly works from. A temporary workplace is one they attend for a limited time or a specific purpose, and travel to it qualifies as business travel. The trigger that flips a workplace from temporary to permanent is the 24-month/40% rule.

A temporary workplace becomes permanent once both of these are true: the employee has been there (or will be there) for more than 24 months, and that location accounts for more than 40% of their working time. Once that threshold is crossed, travel to that location counts as ordinary commuting. The rule is set out in Chapter 3 of Booklet 490.

The passing-through rule

If an employee stops at their permanent workplace on the way to a temporary workplace, the home-to-office portion counts as commuting. The office-to-temporary-workplace portion counts as business travel. If the office stop is incidental to the business journey, the full trip may qualify as business travel. Getting this classification right at submission, rather than retrospectively during month-end, saves your finance team significant rework.

Your mileage claim form needs to require start point, end point, and specific business purpose on every submission. Finance teams can then cross-reference claimed routes against known office locations. The question becomes, does your current submission process make that easy, or are you relying on spot checks after approval?

Company cars and Advisory Fuel Rates: A separate system entirely

Company cars use Advisory Fuel Rates (AFRs), not AMAPs. AMAPs apply only to employees driving their own vehicles. AFRs are significantly lower than AMAP rates, and HMRC updates them every quarter. Paying AMAP rates for a company car journey is one of the most consequential errors in mileage policy.

The table below shows the diesel AFR bands from the GOV.UK AFR schedule, effective from 1 March 2026. HMRC reviews these on 1 March, 1 June, 1 September, and 1 December, so you'll want to verify the current quarter's published rates before applying them.

Paying a company car driver 45p when the correct AFR is 13p creates a significant overpayment. Anything paid above the AFR is treated as taxable earnings, subject to PAYE and National Insurance. Your expense policy needs to clearly distinguish own-vehicle from company-vehicle claims, with the right rate populated automatically based on vehicle type.

Electric and hybrid vehicles

If your fleet includes company-provided electric cars, you'll use the Advisory Electricity Rate (AER) rather than the AFR. Because electricity isn't treated as a fuel under HMRC's rules, reimbursing EV charging at or below the AER doesn't create a taxable benefit for the employee. From 1 March 2026, the AER is 7p per mile for home charging and 15p per mile for public charging. It's a detail that catches a lot of finance teams off guard the first time they process an EV claim.

For employees using their own electric vehicles, the standard 45p/25p AMAP rate applies, the same as petrol or diesel. There's no enhanced or separate AMAP rate for personal EVs, which is worth making explicit in your policy, since employees who've bought an EV often assume otherwise. Hybrid company cars use the petrol or diesel AFR, whichever fuel type the car uses. There's no separate AFR for hybrids.

AERs change quarterly while AMAP rates haven't moved in 15 years. If you're managing a mixed fleet, you'll need to update company car reimbursement tables every quarter and keep records showing whether home or public charging applied to each business journey. This record-keeping is easy to overlook until HMRC or an auditor asks you to split business mileage between home and public charging.

Reclaiming VAT on mileage payments

If your organisation is VAT-registered, you can reclaim some of the VAT on mileage payments, but only on the fuel portion, not the full AMAP rate. The fuel portion is calculated using Advisory Fuel Rates. The reclaimable VAT is one-sixth of the AFR, which reflects the 20% VAT rate. For a petrol car with an AFR of 14p per mile, that works out to roughly 2.3p per mile in recoverable VAT.

Two conditions apply. Your employees must provide valid VAT receipts for fuel, showing they purchased enough to cover the business mileage claimed, and the receipt must be a valid VAT invoice. A card payment slip alone doesn't count. In practice, this is where the reclaim falls apart for most teams.

Nobody thinks to keep a petrol receipt from three weeks ago, and by the time your finance team notices the gap at month-end, the receipt is long gone. Build this into the submission workflow. Ask employees to upload a fuel receipt before the claim is submitted, and you stop leaving recoverable VAT on the table.

How to reduce mileage claims errors without slowing down your team

Most mileage errors trace back to submission-time gaps, not back-office capacity. If the data isn't captured correctly at the moment the journey is claimed, no amount of review can fix it without chasing the employee.

If your finance team is still processing mileage claims through spreadsheets or paper logs, you already know the pain. It's Thursday afternoon, and a regional sales manager has just submitted 47 journey claims for the month in a single batch. Half of them say "client meeting" with no address, and you're trying to work out whether any of the trips were actually their commute to the Birmingham office. You're chasing employees for missing journey details, manually checking cumulative mileage totals, and hoping nobody has slipped their Monday commute into the batch.

Those missing details are the records HMRC would request. And the workflow that allowed them to go missing is what needs to change.

The record-keeping requirement most teams miss

You're still required to keep journey records even if you pay at or below AMAP rates and no tax liability arises. Records reconstructed after the fact, such as estimated annual mileage or round-number monthly claims, aren't accepted. Journey records must be individually documented with date, start point, destination, business purpose, and miles claimed.

HMRC's PAYE rules require these records to be kept for at least three years after the end of the relevant tax year. Corporation Tax rules require six years from the end of the accounting period, which is longer. Most mid-market finance teams standardise on the six-year period to cover both requirements, which also gives you cover if HMRC opens a compliance check on an older return.

What your tracking method needs to deliver

A mid-market finance team's mileage tracking process needs to handle several things at once:

• Automatic rate application at the 10,000-mile threshold

• Mandatory journey-level data capture on every claim

• Vehicle type distinction for AMAP versus AFR rates

• Cumulative mileage tracking per employee across the full tax year

• A six-year-compliant audit trail

Manual spreadsheets technically meet the record-keeping standard, but they depend entirely on employee diligence and retrospective accuracy. Standalone mileage apps improve data capture but typically lack approval workflows or direct accounting integration. For teams processing hundreds of claims monthly, integrated expense management software is the most compliance-ready option. It can check policy rules at submission, and post approved expenses straight to your general ledger (GL).

For example, Spendesk is an all-in-one spend management platform consolidating company cards, expense management, accounts payable, procurement, and budgeting. For mileage specifically, the useful part is structured submission and review. The system prompts employees to enter the right journey details when they submit a claim, then shows approvers all the relevant data on one screen. That reduces the risk of errors caused by missing information or manual checking.

The errors automation actually prevents

The highest-value automation targets for mileage claims are the systematic errors that recur every month across dozens of employees.

• Flat-rate overpayment. A car travelling 12,000 business miles should generate £5,000 in approved mileage: (10,000 x 45p) + (2,000 x 25p). Paying 45p for all 12,000 miles produces £5,400, and the £400 excess over HMRC's approved rates would be treated as taxable earnings rather than tax-free mileage allowance. Automated threshold tracking eliminates this issue.

• Vehicle type misclassification. Motorcycle or bicycle users claiming at the car rate, or company car drivers claiming AMAP instead of AFR. A mandatory vehicle type field with auto-populated rates prevents it at source.

• Duplicate submissions. The same journey appearing in two separate claim periods, or mileage and a train ticket claimed for the same date and route. Automated duplicate detection catches patterns that manual checking misses.

• Missing journey data. Monthly lump-sum claims with no dates, destinations, or business purposes. Making completeness a submission requirement, rather than something finance chases down after approval, means the right person, the employee who actually made the journey, provides the detail.

Moving from spreadsheets to a structured system involves change management effort, and that's worth being honest about. Getting 150 employees to change how they submit expenses is harder than configuring the software. The first few weeks will mean training sessions, support tickets from people who preferred the old spreadsheet, and at least one senior manager who insists on emailing their claims directly. The payoff is a mileage process where compliance is built into the workflow, rather than relying on your finance team to catch errors after the fact. That frees up time for higher-value work like payment reconciliation and month-end close.

Building a mileage policy that holds up under review

Getting the process right only works if the policy underneath it is equally robust. Your mileage policy needs to cover more ground than most templates suggest. Beyond listing the current rates, it should explicitly define business travel using HMRC guidance and state the 24-month/40% rule for temporary workplaces. It should require journey-level data on every claim, distinguish clearly between own-vehicle and company-vehicle reimbursement, and address the passenger supplement as a separate approved amount.

A few details are frequently absent from policies but create real exposure:

• Before 6 April 2016, employers applied to HMRC for dispensation notices, which were formal permissions not to report certain expenses. The statutory exemption replaced them, so any policy still referencing a dispensation notice is relying on a document that no longer exists. The burden of meeting the exemption now rests with you as the employer. No application is required, but your records need to show eligibility.

• Agency workers and umbrella workers need separate treatment. Under rules introduced in April 2016, workers hired through an intermediary (such as an agency or umbrella company) can't claim travel relief on commuting to their assigned workplace if they work under supervision, direction, or control (SDC). That's HMRC's test of who directs the day-to-day work. Before applying your standard mileage policy to these workers, you need to assess whether SDC applies.

• Annual policy reviews matter because AFRs change quarterly. Timing your main policy review to the start of the tax year keeps rate tables up to date with HMRC's current position, with quarterly AFR checks built into your payroll calendar.

Treating these as standing policy questions, rather than items to address the first time an exception surfaces, keeps year-end clean.

Preventing mileage errors before they reach month-end

The claim errors described in the introduction look minor in isolation. A flat rate applied too long, a commuting journey coded as business travel, a company car claim paid at AMAP. Across a full tax year with dozens of claimants, they're exactly the kind of repeated mistakes that turn into P11D corrections, NIC issues, and avoidable rework for your finance team.

If you're reviewing your mileage policy ahead of a potential rate change, check whether your current process can handle tiered rates, vehicle type distinctions, and six-year record retention without manual workarounds. For finance teams that want stronger controls at submission and a clearer audit trail, a structured spend management platform shows what that looks like in practice.

A stronger process moves your finance team from fixing exceptions after submission to preventing them at source, with clearer records, fewer classification mistakes, and less year-end cleanup. That's how you stop the small, routine errors that feel harmless in January from turning into a year's worth of compliance issues by April.

Frequently asked questions about UK mileage rates

Do AMAP rates apply to employees who drive their own electric vehicles?

Yes. Employees using their own electric vehicles for business travel claim the same AMAP rates as petrol or diesel cars. That's 45p per mile for the first 10,000 business miles, then 25p. There's no separate or enhanced AMAP rate for personal EVs. The distinction only matters for company-provided electric vehicles, which use the Advisory Electricity Rate (AER) published quarterly by HMRC.

Can employees claim mileage for journeys that start from home?

It depends on the destination. A journey from home to an employee's permanent workplace is ordinary commuting and isn't reimbursable tax-free, even at the AMAP rate. A journey from home to a temporary workplace, such as a client site or a different branch visited for a specific purpose, generally qualifies as business travel. The test is whether the destination meets HMRC's definition of a temporary workplace under the 24-month/40% rule in Booklet 490, Chapter 3.

How often do Advisory Fuel Rates change, and where are they published?

HMRC reviews and publishes Advisory Fuel Rates quarterly. New rates typically take effect on 1 March, 1 June, 1 September, and 1 December each year. The current rates are always available on GOV.UK. If your organisation has company car drivers, you'll need a process to check and update your reimbursement rates each quarter to avoid over- or underpayment.

What is the passenger supplement and when does it apply?

The passenger supplement is an additional 5p per mile that can be paid tax-free for each passenger carried on a business journey, provided the passenger is also travelling for business purposes. It applies on top of the standard AMAP rate for the driver. The supplement is a separate approved amount under HMRC's EIM31200, so it should be recorded and claimed as a distinct line item rather than rolled into the driver's mileage rate.

How long do mileage records need to be retained?

For PAYE purposes, HMRC requires mileage records to be retained for at least three years after the end of the relevant tax year. For Corporation Tax, supporting records should be kept for six years from the end of the accounting period. Most mid-market finance teams standardise on the six-year period to cover both requirements. Each record should include the date, start point, destination, business purpose, and miles claimed; extrapolated or estimated records aren't accepted.