How to claim mileage as a UK musician: the rates, the record and the box it goes in

If you drive to gigs, your car is doing a large part of your job, and the cost of that is one of the biggest things a working musician can set against their income. This is the long version of how that works in the UK: the two ways to claim, when the journey from your front door counts, what the record has to show, and where the figure ends up on the return.

It is written for somebody who is self-employed and plays for more than one band, which is most function and depping players. It is not tax advice about your own year. Where your situation is unusual, or the numbers are large, the house line applies: check with your accountant.

What are the two ways to claim?

HMRC gives a self-employed person two ways to count the cost of a vehicle.

The flat rate. Under what gov.uk calls simplified expenses, you record your business miles and multiply them by a set rate, instead of working out the actual costs of buying and running the vehicle — gov.uk's own examples are insurance, repairs, servicing and fuel. For the 2026 to 2027 tax year the rates for cars and goods vehicles are:

• 55p a mile for the first 10,000 business miles;
• 25p a mile after that.

Before 6 April 2026 the first rate was 45p; the 25p rate has not moved. Motorcycles are 24p a mile. The same figures appear on gov.uk's travel, mileage and fuel rates page. If you want the news version of that change, with worked examples, HMRC's mileage rate is now 55p covers it.

Simplified expenses are open to sole traders and to partnerships with no companies as partners, which covers almost every working player. You do not have to use them.

Actual costs. The alternative is to add up what the vehicle really cost you over the year — fuel, insurance, servicing, repairs, breakdown cover, vehicle tax — and claim the business share of it. gov.uk's list of allowable travel costs for the self-employed is the checklist. The cost of buying the vehicle itself is dealt with through capital allowances rather than as a running cost, which is where an accountant earns their fee.

Which one suits a musician?

The flat rate is simpler, and for a player who drives an ordinary car a long way it is usually the easier one to live with, because the record it needs is the one you should be keeping anyway: miles. Actual costs can come out higher for an expensive vehicle, or a van that does little private driving, but you need every receipt and a business percentage you can stand behind.

Two rules make the choice for you over time. gov.uk says you cannot use the flat rate for a vehicle you have already claimed capital allowances for, or included as an expense in your profits, and that once you use the flat rate for a vehicle you must keep using it for as long as that vehicle is in your business. HMRC's simplified expenses checker runs the comparison for you.

Whichever you choose, the same gov.uk page says parking and other travel, such as train fares, can be claimed on top of the flat rate.

Does the drive from home to the gig count?

This is the question that matters most to a musician, and the one most often answered wrongly in both directions.

The starting point is a rule that sounds bad for you. gov.uk's list of travel costs says plainly that you cannot claim for travel between home and work. HMRC's Business Income Manual explains why: the journey from where you live to your place of work is treated as partly the result of your private choice of where to live.

But the same manual has a separate page for trades where the work itself moves. It describes an "itinerant" trader as one who travels from home to a number of different places, for the purely temporary purpose at each of completing a job of work, and then goes on somewhere else. Where such a trader's base of operations is at home, the manual says the cost of travelling between home and those places should be allowed. The leading case it cites is about a bricklayer working on one building site after another, but the shape will be familiar: a different venue every Saturday, a different county every week, the gear and the admin at home.

So for a player whose work is a string of one-off gigs in different places, run from home, the drive to each gig and back is normally the business journey the flat rate is built for.

Where a residency can be different

The judgment the manual quotes says travel of this kind will normally be allowable, and chose that word because every case depends on its own facts. It also sets aside the case of someone whose home is outside the area they work in, with the example of a commercial traveller living in London whose patch is Cornwall.

The itinerant rule is about temporary visits to changing places. A regular residency — the same hotel bar every Friday for a year, the same theatre for a long run — starts to look less like a series of one-off jobs and more like a place of work you travel to from home. The manual itself records a judge's warning against stretching the "base of operations" test beyond its narrow scope.

If most of your income comes from one venue on a fixed pattern, do not assume every one of those journeys counts. That is precisely the case to take to an accountant, with your diary in hand.

What does the record have to show?

gov.uk's simplified expenses guidance says you need to keep records of your business miles. For a musician that means one line per journey:

• the date;
• where from — your home postcode, or wherever you really set off;
• where to — the venue's postcode;
• the purpose — the band and the gig is enough;
• the miles, and whether that is one way or the round trip (be consistent).

Postcodes at both ends are worth the effort, because a postcode-to-postcode distance can be checked by anybody, at any time, by entering the same two postcodes again. A remembered figure cannot be checked by anybody, including you.

Keep the record as you go. A line written on the night takes seconds. A year of gigs rebuilt from group chats in January takes an evening and produces a worse answer.

This is the part Event Band Manager does for a player. Every gig you play carries its own mileage, worked out from your home postcode to the venue and back, for every band you are in and every gig you cover as a dep. The figure is recorded with the gig, it is the same one your band used on the statement, and My pay totals the year by tax year as well as by calendar year and lets you take it away as a file. If you only want the distances for a band's worth of players, the free band mileage calculator works them out from everyone's own postcode with no account.

Deps: whose journey is it?

When somebody covers for you, the journey belongs to the person who made it. The dep drove from their home to the venue and back; you did not drive anywhere. The dep's mileage is theirs to record, from their own postcode, and a gig you did not travel to is not a journey in your record.

The band has its own version of the same rule. Most bands pay the member as though they had played and let the member settle with the dep, but the travel on that gig should still be the dep's journey from the dep's postcode, because that is the drive that happened. What a dep costs, and who pays whom goes through that arithmetic, and what a dep is covers the rest.

If you are the dep, your record should carry every gig you covered, with the band's name and the venue, exactly as your own band's gigs do.

Can you claim for passengers?

Bands share cars all the time, and it is a fair question whether carrying a bandmate is worth anything on your return.

gov.uk's rates page does list a passenger payment of 5p a mile, but it describes it as a payment for carrying fellow employees in a car or van on journeys that are also work journeys for them. That is an employer's arrangement. The self-employed simplified expenses rates have no passenger rate at all: the flat rate is per business mile, however many people are in the car.

For the band's own sheet, the clean rule is the one in how UK function bands split gig money: the driver claims the miles and the passenger claims none, so one journey appears once.

Is the band's rate the same as HMRC's?

No. Your band almost certainly pays travel at its own per-mile figure, taken out of the fee before the split. That number is the band's arrangement for dividing its own money. HMRC's rate is about your own tax return. The two do different jobs and neither governs the other; the glossary entry on travel and mileage says it in a paragraph.

How the travel money your band pays you sits alongside your own mileage claim depends on how you account for your income, and it is exactly the kind of question to ask once, properly, of whoever does your books.

Where does it go on the return?

If you use the self-employment (short) page, the most recent published version, SA103S for 2025 to 2026, has box 12: Car, van and travel expenses — after private use proportion. The same page says that if your annual turnover was below £90,000 you may put your total expenses in box 20 rather than filling in each box. Box numbers can move between years, so check the page for the year you are filing.

Two more things are worth knowing before you get there:

• The trading allowance. gov.uk describes a trading allowance of up to £1,000 a year, and says you cannot deduct any other expenses if you claim it. For a player with real mileage, the allowance and a mileage claim are an either-or.
• Making Tax Digital. gov.uk says that if your qualifying income was over £50,000 in the 2024 to 2025 tax year you should have started using Making Tax Digital for Income Tax from 6 April 2026, with the threshold falling to £30,000 from April 2027 and £20,000 from April 2028. If that is you, your mileage goes into digital records during the year rather than onto one page at the end of it.

The short version

Pick a method per vehicle and stick with it. For most gigging musicians that is the flat rate: 55p a mile for the first 10,000 business miles in 2026/27, 25p after. The drive from home to a string of different venues is normally a business journey; a fixed residency may not be. Keep one line per journey, postcode to postcode, on the night. Deps record their own journeys. There is no passenger supplement for the self-employed. And when the answer depends on your particular year, ask an accountant with the record in front of you — the record is the part only you can produce.