What Expenses Can I Claim as a Self-Employed Tradesperson? The Plain-English List
Ask a tradesperson what they earned last year and most can give you a rough number. Ask them what they spent running the business — properly, every receipt — and you'll usually get a shrug.
That shrug costs money. Every pound of legitimate business expense you don't claim is a pound of profit you pay tax and National Insurance on for no reason. For a sole trader paying 20% Income Tax plus 6% Class 4 National Insurance, that's roughly 26p back in your pocket for every pound you actually record. Lose £2,000 of expenses across a year because the receipts faded in the van and you've handed HMRC over £500 you never owed them.
So this is the plain-English list: what a UK self-employed tradesperson can claim, what you can't, the 2026 rates that matter, and — the bit everyone skips — how to actually keep the records so the claim survives.
The one rule everything hangs off: "wholly and exclusively"
HMRC's test for an allowable expense is that it was incurred wholly and exclusively for the purposes of the trade. That's the whole game. If you bought it for the business, it counts. If you bought it for yourself, it doesn't.
The grey area — and where most tradespeople either over-claim or under-claim — is the stuff that's a bit of both. Your mobile phone. Your broadband. The van you also use to do the weekly shop. You don't have to throw those out; you just have to claim a fair business proportion. If your phone is 80% work calls and quotes, claim 80% of the bill. Be sensible and be able to explain it, and you're fine. Try to claim 100% of a phone you clearly also use for family WhatsApp and you've got a problem if anyone ever looks.
Keep that rule in your head and the rest of this list mostly answers itself.
What you can claim
Materials and stock
The obvious one. Every bag of plaster, length of cable, box of fittings, tin of paint and bag of sand you buy to do a job is an allowable expense. So is anything you buy to sell on to a customer.
The thing tradespeople get wrong here isn't whether to claim — it's losing the merchant receipts. A £180 Screwfix run, a £60 top-up at the local builders' merchant, a £40 trade counter visit — three receipts in a week, dozens across a year, and by January half of them are pulp. Each lost one is money you spent that you can't prove, so you can't claim it.
Tools and equipment
Hand tools, power tools, drill bits, blades, testers, ladders, work lights — the kit you actually do the job with is claimable. Small tools you buy regularly go straight down as an expense in the year you buy them.
Bigger, longer-lasting kit — a decent SDS drill, a cement mixer, a generator, a laser level — can be claimed too, usually through the Annual Investment Allowance, which lets you write off the full cost of qualifying equipment against your profit in the year you buy it (up to a generous limit that no sole trader is realistically going to hit). The practical upshot is the same: you get tax relief on it. If you're not sure whether something's a straight expense or a capital allowance, that's a five-second question for your accountant — but the point is you claim it somewhere, so keep the receipt either way.
Your van and vehicle costs
This is the big one for most trades, and you get a choice. Pick one of two methods per vehicle:
Method 1 — Simplified mileage. You claim a flat rate per business mile and that single figure covers everything: fuel, servicing, MOT, insurance, repairs, wear and tear. From 6 April 2026 the rate rose to 55p per mile for the first 10,000 business miles in the tax year, then 25p a mile after that. That 55p is worth flagging — it had been stuck at 45p for fifteen years, so if you've been working off the old figure, you're now under-claiming. You log your business miles (site visits, merchant runs, quotes — not your commute if you have a fixed base) and multiply.
Method 2 — Actual costs. You add up the real cost of running the van — fuel, insurance, road tax, repairs, servicing — and claim the business proportion, plus the cost of the van itself through capital allowances. More paperwork, but it can win if your van's thirsty or expensive to keep on the road.
You can't run both methods on the same van, and once you choose mileage for a vehicle you have to stick with it for as long as you use that van. For most sole traders with a normal work van, mileage is simpler and perfectly fair — but log the miles as you go, because reconstructing a year of journeys from memory the night before the deadline is a nightmare and HMRC can ask you to back it up.
Mileage is only worth anything if you actually log it
Worth saying on its own, because it's the most-missed claim in the trade. A sole trader doing 12,000 business miles a year at the new rates can claim £5,500 + £500 = £6,000 against profit. At 26% combined tax and NI, that's around £1,560 back. Almost nobody logs every journey, so almost nobody claims the full amount. The fix is to capture each trip the moment it happens — "22 miles to the Henderson job and back" — not to guess in January.
Work clothing and PPE
You can claim protective and safety clothing and branded uniform:
- Steel-toe boots, hard hats, hi-vis, safety glasses, ear defenders, gloves, knee pads, overalls, dust masks
- Workwear with your business name printed or embroidered on it
You can't claim ordinary clothing you happen to wear for work — plain jeans, a normal t-shirt, a fleece without your logo. HMRC's view is that everyday clothes aren't an allowable expense even if you only ever wear them on site, because they also keep you warm and decent, which is a personal benefit. Branded or protective only.
Insurance
Public liability insurance, tools and equipment insurance, professional indemnity, and the business element of your van insurance (if you're on the actual-cost method) are all allowable. For a lot of trades, public liability is non-negotiable to get on site in the first place — and it's fully claimable.
Trade memberships, certifications and licences
The fees that keep you legal and credible are allowable: NICEIC or NAPIT registration for sparkies, Gas Safe for heating engineers, scaffold tickets, CSCS cards, asbestos awareness, first aid, IPAF, PASMA — the renewals and the courses to keep them current. Subscriptions to a trade body count too.
A note on training: HMRC allows training that maintains or updates the skills you already use in the business. Re-certifying your Gas Safe registration is fine. A course to learn an entirely new trade you don't yet do is treated as setting up a new skill and is usually not allowable — a fair question for your accountant if you're branching out.
Phone, internet and software
The business share of your mobile bill and home broadband is claimable — you're running quotes, invoices, supplier calls and customer messages off them all day. Apportion it honestly. Any software or subscriptions you use to run the business — accounting tools, design software, your TradesOffice subscription — are allowable in full.
Working from home
If you do your quotes, invoicing and admin from home (and what tradesperson doesn't), you can claim for it. The easy route is HMRC's simplified flat rate, which needs no receipts and no working out a proportion of your gas bill:
- £10 a month if you work 25–50 hours a month from home
- £18 a month for 51–100 hours
- £26 a month for 101+ hours
For most sole traders doing an hour of admin most evenings, the top band lands around £312 a year claimed with zero paperwork. You can instead work out the actual proportion of your household bills, but for the time it takes, the flat rate usually wins.
Professional fees and bank charges
Your accountant's fee for preparing your accounts and tax return is allowable. So are bank charges on a business account, interest on a business loan or van finance, and the fees on a card machine or payment service you use to take money from customers.
Advertising and getting work
The cost of finding the next job counts: a Facebook or Google ad, business cards, van signage, a website, leaflets, sign-writing. The money you spend to bring work in is a business cost like any other.
What you can't claim
Quick, so nobody trips up:
- Your own wages or "drawings." Money you take out of the business for yourself isn't an expense — as a sole trader, the profit is your income. (Wages you pay an actual employee or a labourer are claimable.)
- Client entertaining. Lunch to win a customer over, drinks with a contractor — not allowable for sole traders, however good the business reason.
- Everyday clothing. Covered above. Protective and branded only.
- Fines. Parking tickets, speeding fines, penalties — never allowable, even if you got the parking ticket on a job.
- Your commute. Travel from home to a fixed, regular place of work. Genuine site-to-site and merchant runs are fine; the daily there-and-back to one base isn't.
- Anything personal. The shopping in the van, the family Netflix, the half of the phone bill that's personal calls.
If you're invoicing through the Construction Industry Scheme, expenses matter even more — because CIS already takes tax off your labour up front, claiming every legitimate cost is often what turns a deduction into a refund at year end. The more clean expenses you've recorded, the lower your final bill and the bigger the difference HMRC pays back.
The part everyone skips: keeping the records
Here's the uncomfortable truth. The list above is the easy bit — most tradespeople roughly know what's claimable. What actually loses the money is the records. You're legally required to keep proof of every figure on your return for at least five years after the 31 January deadline, and a thermal receipt from the builders' merchant is unreadable long before then. Lose the proof and you lose the claim, however legitimate it was.
This is also no longer just good practice — it's the law catching up. Under Making Tax Digital for Income Tax, sole traders over the income threshold now have to keep digital records of income and expenses and send HMRC a summary every quarter. The shoebox isn't just risky any more; it doesn't meet the requirement. A photo of the receipt, captured the day you got it, does.
The problem has never been knowing you should keep receipts. It's that the moment you should capture one — handed a slip outside Screwfix with both hands full of timber — is the worst possible moment to start filing paperwork. So it goes in the door pocket, and the door pocket is where receipts go to die. Same reason paper invoices quietly cost trades thousands: the admin happens at exactly the wrong time, so it doesn't happen at all.
The only record-keeping system that works for a busy sole trader is one that takes ten seconds and uses something already in your hand. For most tradespeople that's their phone, and specifically WhatsApp — the one app they're already in all day.
That's the whole idea behind TradesOffice. You photograph the receipt and send it to Amy on WhatsApp the second it's in your hand. She reads it, pulls out the supplier, the amount and the VAT, files it under the correct HMRC expense category, and keeps a running total of what you've spent this year. No app to download, no new number, no data entry. The expense is captured at the only moment you'll reliably do it — straight away — and it's a proper digital record from the off. When January comes, or when a quarterly MTD update is due, the figures are already sorted and your accountant isn't chasing you for a carrier bag of faded slips.
You spent the money. The least it can do is cut your tax bill. The difference between claiming it and losing it is almost never whether it was allowable — it's whether you kept the proof.
Frequently asked questions
What expenses can a self-employed tradesperson claim? Anything bought wholly and exclusively for the business: materials and stock, tools and small equipment, van running costs or mileage, protective and branded work clothing, public liability and tools insurance, trade body and certification fees, the business share of your phone and internet, accountant's fees, advertising, and a flat-rate amount for working from home. Bigger items like a van or a mixer are usually claimed as capital allowances rather than a straight expense, but you still get the relief. The test is always whether the cost was for the business or for you personally.
Can I claim for my van as a sole trader? Yes, and you pick one of two methods per vehicle. Either claim simplified mileage — from 6 April 2026 that's 55p a mile for the first 10,000 business miles, then 25p — which covers fuel, servicing, insurance and wear in one figure; or claim the actual running costs plus the van itself through capital allowances. You can't mix the two for the same van, and once you choose mileage for a vehicle you keep that method for as long as you use it. Mileage is simpler for most sole traders.
Can I claim for work clothes and boots? You can claim protective and safety clothing — steel-toe boots, hard hats, hi-vis, gloves, knee pads, overalls — and uniform with your business name on it. You can't claim everyday clothes like plain jeans or a t-shirt, even if you only wear them for work, because HMRC treats ordinary clothing as a personal expense.
How much can I claim for working from home? Using HMRC's simplified flat rate, you claim £10 a month for 25–50 hours of home working, £18 for 51–100 hours, and £26 for 101+ hours — no receipts, no working out a share of your bills. For most tradespeople doing admin most evenings that's the top band, roughly £312 a year. You can instead claim the actual business proportion of your household costs if it works out higher.
Do I need to keep receipts for every expense? Yes. You must be able to back up every figure on your return and keep the records for at least five years after the 31 January deadline. A faded paper receipt won't last that long, which is why a photo taken the day you bought it — stored digitally — is the safer record, and it's exactly what Making Tax Digital now expects.
Knowing what you can claim is worth nothing if the receipts don't make it to January. The claim almost never fails because the cost wasn't allowable — it fails because the proof went missing. Fix the capture and you fix the claim.
TradesOffice is a WhatsApp-first administration service for UK sole traders. Photograph a receipt and send it to Amy — she reads it, categorises it for HMRC and keeps a running total, so your expenses are recorded the moment you spend, not the weekend before the deadline. No app, no new number, no forms.
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