Travel Expenses for Landlords

Travel genuinely undertaken for your rental business, visiting a property to deal with a repair, meeting a letting agent, or driving to the accountant with your records, is an allowable expense. The trip has to be wholly for business purposes, and you have a choice of two ways to work out what you can claim for a vehicle: a fixed mileage rate, or your actual running costs plus capital allowances.

This guide covers what counts as business travel, how the two claim methods work, who can use which, and the record keeping that supports a claim if HMRC ever asks.

What counts as business travel

The test is the same "wholly and exclusively" rule that applies to every other rental expense, covered in our landlord allowable expenses guide. A journey made purely to inspect a property, meet a contractor, show a prospective tenant around, or deal with a compliance visit such as an annual property inspection is deductible in full. A journey that mixes business with a personal errand, stopping at a rental property on the way to visit family, for example, is not automatically split; if you gain a substantial private benefit from the trip, HMRC's starting position is that the whole journey fails the test, not just the personal portion, though an incidental personal benefit that was not the purpose of the trip, stopping for a coffee on the way, does not usually cause a problem.

Travel to acquire a property in the first place sits outside this rule entirely. Viewing a property before you own it, or travelling to complete on a purchase, is a cost of acquiring the asset, not of running an existing letting business, so it is a capital cost rather than a revenue expense, relevant to a future Capital Gains Tax calculation rather than this year's rental profit.

Two ways to claim

Fixed mileage rates. Individual landlords, and partnerships made up entirely of individuals, can use HMRC's approved mileage rates instead of tracking actual running costs. For 2026/27 the rates are 55p per mile for the first 10,000 business miles in a car or van in the tax year, dropping to 25p per mile after that, with separate rates of 24p per mile for motorcycles and 20p per mile for bicycles. These are simple to apply: multiply the business miles by the relevant rate, and that figure is your deduction for the vehicle, covering fuel, servicing, insurance and depreciation all in one number. Once you choose the mileage rate method for a particular vehicle, you generally need to keep using it for that vehicle for as long as you use it in the business, rather than switching back and forth between methods year to year.

Actual costs and capital allowances. The alternative is to track the real running costs of the vehicle, fuel, insurance, servicing, repairs, and claim the business-use proportion of each, alongside plant and machinery capital allowances on the cost of the vehicle itself, again restricted to the business-use share. This route suits a landlord who does high mileage in an expensive vehicle, where actual costs comfortably beat the flat mileage rate, but it comes with materially more record keeping, since every fuel receipt and repair invoice needs to be kept and apportioned.

Landlords who are limited companies, or partnerships that include a company as a partner, cannot use the fixed mileage rate method at all. A company must use actual costs and capital allowances for any vehicle it owns, or reimburse a director's own mileage using the same HMRC rates as a tax-free expense payment instead of the company owning the vehicle.

Other travel costs

Beyond vehicle mileage, other genuine business travel is deductible on the same wholly-and-exclusively basis: train fares to view a property you already own, taxi fares to a meeting with a letting agent, parking charges and toll fees incurred on a business journey, and reasonable subsistence costs on a trip that genuinely requires an overnight stay, such as inspecting a property some distance from home. As with mileage, the trip has to be for the property business specifically, so a train ticket for a journey that also covers a personal visit needs the same care in deciding whether the trip qualifies at all.

Worked example. A landlord owns three rental properties within a reasonable driving distance and makes 40 round trips across the year to deal with viewings, inspections and contractor visits, totalling 1,600 business miles. Using the mileage rate, the deduction is 1,600 x 55p, giving £880 for the year, with no further paperwork needed beyond the mileage log itself. If the same landlord instead tracked actual costs, fuel, insurance, servicing and a capital allowance claim on the car, apportioned to the 1,600 business miles out of, say, 9,000 total miles driven that year, the outcome might be higher or lower depending on the vehicle and its running costs, but would require considerably more record keeping to substantiate.

Portfolios spread over distance

Landlords whose properties are spread across a wider area, rather than clustered near home, tend to generate meaningfully higher mileage totals, and it is worth tracking this carefully rather than estimating at year end, since the gap between the mileage rate and actual costs can be larger over longer distances. It is also worth keeping an eye on the 10,000-mile threshold within the mileage rate method itself: once you cross it in a tax year, every further business mile in a car or van drops to the lower 25p rate, so a landlord doing significant mileage across several properties may want to compare the two claim methods properly for the year rather than assuming the simpler mileage rate is always the better outcome. Attending a genuinely relevant training course, a landlord association event, or a meeting specifically about your rental business also counts as business travel on the same basis as visiting a property, provided the trip is wholly for that purpose rather than combined with a personal outing.

Common mistakes

• Claiming a mixed-purpose trip in full. A journey with a substantial personal element is at risk of being disallowed entirely rather than apportioned, so it is safer to keep clearly business-only trips separate from ones that also serve a personal purpose.
• Switching methods on the same vehicle. Moving between mileage rates and actual costs for the same car in different years, rather than choosing one method and sticking with it, is a common point HMRC guidance specifically warns against.
• Claiming travel to buy a property against rental income. Costs of acquiring a new property are capital, not revenue, however similar the journey feels to visiting an existing let.
• Losing the underlying mileage log. HMRC does not need to see it at the time you file, but you must be able to produce a log of dates, purposes and distances if asked, ideally kept as you go rather than reconstructed from memory months later.

How PropMaps helps

PropMaps lets you log a trip against a property as it happens, tagging the date, purpose and distance, so your mileage claim is a running total ready for Making Tax Digital or your annual return, rather than a logbook you have to rebuild at year end.

Disclaimer

This guide is general information for UK landlords, not tax advice. Check GOV.UK, HMRC or a qualified adviser for your situation.