Running the business

What you can claim as expenses (self-employed trades)

By QuoteSnap·5 August 2026·7 min read

Every pound of legitimate business expense you don't claim is a pound you pay tax on for no reason. And most self-employed tradespeople under-claim — not because they're being cautious, but because nobody ever told them the phone bill, the accountant and the kitchen-table admin all count.

Here's what's allowable, what isn't, and where the grey areas actually sit. Tax rules change and the detail matters — use this as a map of the territory and confirm specifics with gov.uk or an accountant.

The test: wholly and exclusively

The core rule for the self-employed is that a cost must be incurred wholly and exclusively for the purposes of the trade.

"Wholly and exclusively" doesn't mean you can never claim anything with personal use. It means the business portion of a cost with a clear split — like a phone or a vehicle — can usually be claimed, provided you apportion it on a reasonable, defensible basis. What you can't do is claim something with a dual purpose that can't be separated, which is why the everyday clothes example below fails.

The obvious ones

Claim all of these without hesitation:

Materials bought for jobs
Subcontractors you pay
Tools and consumables — blades, bits, fixings, abrasives, adhesives
Plant and tool hire
Skip hire and tip charges
Public liability, employers' liability, tools and van insurance — see business insurance for trades
Trade body and scheme fees — Gas Safe, NICEIC, NAPIT, FMB and similar
Accountant's fees
Bank charges on the business account
Advertising and marketing — van signage, leaflets, directory listings, Google ads, website hosting
Software you use for the business — quoting, invoicing, accounts

The van and travel

Two methods, and you pick one per vehicle:

Actual costs. Claim the business proportion of fuel, insurance, tax, MOT, servicing, repairs, tyres, breakdown cover, plus capital allowances on the vehicle itself. More paperwork, usually better for a van with high running costs.

Simplified mileage. A flat rate per business mile at HMRC's approved rates, which covers everything about running the vehicle. Much less admin. Once you use mileage for a vehicle, you generally have to stick with it for as long as you have that vehicle.

Two things to get right:

Commuting doesn't count. Travel from home to a regular, permanent place of work isn't business travel. For most trades going to a different site every day, journeys from home to site are business travel — but if you attend the same site for months, it starts to look like a permanent workplace. It's a genuinely fact-specific area.
Keep a mileage log. Date, journey, purpose, miles. An app does it automatically. Without one, a claim is a guess, and guesses don't survive an enquiry.

Also claimable: parking while working (not fines — never fines), congestion and clean air charges on business journeys, tolls, and public transport for business travel.

Tools and equipment — capital, not day-to-day

Small consumables go through as normal expenses. Bigger, lasting items — the van, a mixer, a decent SDS set, a laptop — are capital and are usually relieved through capital allowances, most commonly the Annual Investment Allowance, which lets you write off qualifying items against profit up to an annual limit.

That limit, and what qualifies, changes. Check the current position before making a big purchase decision based on the tax relief.

If you use the cash basis (recording money in and out when it moves, available to smaller businesses), the treatment of equipment is different and often simpler. Worth asking your accountant which basis suits you.

Workwear: where people get it wrong

Claimable: protective clothing (boots, hi-vis, gloves, hard hats, knee pads, goggles, overalls) and branded uniform with your business name on it.

Not claimable: ordinary clothes you happen to wear for work. Jeans, plain t-shirts, a fleece with no logo. The argument that you'd never wear them otherwise doesn't work — this is the classic dual-purpose failure, because clothing also serves the everyday purpose of keeping you warm and decent.

The practical answer: get things branded. A logo on the polo shirts and the fleece turns a non-claimable wardrobe into claimable uniform, and it's better marketing anyway.

Phone, internet and use of home

Phone. If it's a dedicated business phone, claim it all. If it's one phone for both, claim the business proportion on a reasonable basis. Be able to explain how you arrived at the percentage.

Broadband. Same principle. If the household would have it anyway, only the identifiable business element is claimable — which is often modest.

Use of home. You do quotes, invoicing and ordering from home, so there's a claim. Two routes:

Simplified flat rate — a fixed monthly amount based on hours worked at home. Easy, safe, low.
Apportioned actual costs — a proportion of heating, lighting, council tax, insurance, mortgage interest or rent, based on rooms used and time. More work, usually bigger, and needs a sensible basis.

If you have a lock-up, unit or storage, that rent is a straightforward business expense.

Training

The distinction that matters: training to maintain or update existing skills is generally allowable. Training to acquire a new skill or qualification — a genuinely new trade or capability — is often treated as capital and not allowable as a revenue expense.

So a gas engineer's ACS reassessment: fine. A plumber training from scratch as an electrician: much harder to argue. In between there's a lot of grey, and it's worth asking rather than assuming in either direction.

Scheme registration and certification fees are ordinary business costs and are claimable.

Food, drink and staying away

The rule most trades get wrong: everyday food and drink isn't claimable just because you ate it at work. You'd have had to eat anyway — dual purpose.

Where a claim does work:

Reasonable subsistence when travelling away from your normal pattern of work, particularly overnight
Accommodation when staying away for a job
There are simplified flat rates available for some overnight expenses

A meal deal on the way to a site you go to every week isn't going to fly.

Things you generally can't claim

Fines and penalties — parking, speeding, HMRC penalties
Client entertaining — taking a customer out is not deductible
Your own wages as a sole trader — you're taxed on profit, you can't pay yourself a deductible wage
Personal drawings of any kind
Ordinary clothes
The personal proportion of anything mixed
Life insurance for yourself, usually
Costs of setting up a limited company, in some circumstances — check

Things people forget to claim

This is where the money is. Check whether you're claiming:

Accountant's fee
Business phone and the business share of broadband
Use of home
Bank charges and interest on business borrowing
Merchant/card processing fees on customer payments
Software subscriptions
Trade magazines and technical publications
Van cleaning and valeting
PPE replacements — they go through constantly and rarely get logged
Website, domain and hosting
Bad debts — an invoice you've genuinely written off can usually be relieved. See when a customer won't pay.
Pension contributions — technically personal relief rather than a business expense, but they reduce your tax and the money stays yours

Keep the evidence or it didn't happen

A claim without a record is a claim you'll lose if anyone asks. The practical system:

Separate business bank account — the single biggest time-saver
Photograph every receipt the day you get it. Thermal paper fades to blank in a glovebox.
One place for everything — an app, a folder, whatever you'll actually use
Do it monthly, not in January

More on this in keeping records for HMRC, and on how it all feeds the return in Self Assessment basics.

The honest summary

Claim everything genuinely for the business, apportion honestly where there's private use, don't claim your jeans or your lunch, and keep the receipt for all of it. Then get an accountant to look over it once a year — they'll find the ones you missed, which for most trades more than covers their fee.

Half of good record-keeping is just having every job written down in one place from the start. QuoteSnap keeps your quotes, customers and jobs together, so the year adds up without a shoebox. Try it free for 14 days.