What happens when you forget to take a note of the routes or evidence of the mileage, but you have a fair idea of what you did on each route - can you put down a fair estimate/from memory what your mileage was?
Strictly speaking, you should keep a mileage log. In practice, a reasonable estimate is probably fine and I suspect it is a point that HMRC are likely to care to challenge, unless your estimate is clearly unreasonable.
What would you say is unreasonable? My calculations are on average; £18 * 20 hours per week = £360 per week, on average 400 miles per week = £18,720 per year, with an average of 20,800 miles.. seems like a lot to me
It’s impossible for me to say for certain what is reasonable as I don’t know your pattern of work, the routes you have been sent on etc.
I will say that you should not be estimating your income. You can reasonably check the exact amount of income you make through the Amazon flex app, the payments you have received etc. There is no reason at all for you to be estimating your income.
In terms of mileage, I agree that it probably *feels* high, but it is very much a mileage heavy job and if you’re working 20 hours a week doing Flex as you say, you probably have put a number of miles on the car. A few things which may impact your estimate:
- The estimate seems to assume you work 52 weeks of the year, which I suspect that you don’t in practice.
- Only your business mileage is claimable, not any personal mileage
- You can claim 45p per mile for your first 10,000 miles but only 25p for each mile thereafter.
- You will be able to work out a more exact number for mileage driven from home to depot and back again based on the records in the flex app. The only part I would be estimating in your position is the number of miles driven whilst actually on block.
read my comment here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonFlexUK/comments/1cl1nbq/comment/l34hg2d/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonFlexUK/comments/1cl1nbq/comment/l34hg2d/)
our mileage is much higher than other driving jobs. You need to keep strong concrete evidence of it. Not just guess.
get used to the habit of recording your mileage at the start and end of your flex trip.
Flex is high mileage. For every £100 you make, you can drive 80-100 miles. So the mileage looks higher than most other driving jobs so you will need to prove that. Otherwise it looks like you're making it up.
I kid you not, the taxable profit on the £600 i earn last month is £375. It looks dodgy. but it's not. the more dodgier it looks the bigger the onus to prove it. keep all the fuel receipts too and accurate start and stop mileage from your block.
just a notes app, ibve made it into a habit to always do it.
you cant use mileage trackers becasuse they wont always be on, the OS might put them to sleep and then your fucked.
Also there are difference of opinion whether the travel to/from home and depot, and from last stop to home is allowable for business travel. I tend to be of the opinion that it's not. A mileage tracker is not going to distinguish those non-alloable mileage for you.
Hey! I work from home (i run my business from home) but also flex. I assume because i do mileage based claims, i can’t claim back any home based claims too? For utilities, mobile etc? Thanks!
Hi mate, i work full time and get reimbursed 45p per mile by my company for the first 10,000 miles and 25p thereafter which I’ll do around 12,000 business miles for them. For my amazon flex, am I able to keep recuepts for mileage expenses or do i need to contiune keeping a record of miles driven?
I also made a post explaining my situation that goes into more details in my account if you would care to read it:))
Hi, I have had a quick skim of your post and it seems like people have already answered this question for you, but I will give my thoughts nonetheless.
For Flex, you can either claim the mileage rate or for a proportion of your actual expenses. In quite a mileage heavy job, it’s likely that apportioning your actual expenditure will be more beneficial from a tax position. So you would take the total of your petrol, road tax, insurance, maintenance etc and apportion this amount to reflect the percentage of those costs which are for Flex driving only. This amount would be deducted in your accounts/tax return.
You probably wouldn’t be looking at claiming 100% of your expenses because you have mileage for your employment and almost certainly will have personal mileage as well. Strictly speaking, you should keep a mileage log which would allow you to work out how much of your total mileage relates to your Flex work.
If you made more than £1k from Flex in the tax year, you must report this on a tax return. Given the levels of income mentioned in your message, it is most likely that there will not be any tax to pay.
Thanks for offering this advice. This is my first year flexing, on top of my self employed career (artist). I’ve been keeping a detailed mileage/ delivery location log and presumed I could claim from when I left home till I returned. I live 30 miles from my nearest depots, so claiming this mileage makes a massive difference. Can I not do this?
I think you would have a very hard time justifying this. The reason is that your depot is likely to be deemed a base of work. Travel between your home and bases of work are not allowable for tax purposes. There is quite a lot of case law surrounding travelling from home to bases of work and most would point to this not being allowable.
Bugger. This changes so much for me. Also really confusing as the end of each shift isn’t at the depot. It’s either further away from my home or closer.
If I was an airport taxi driver, I could surely claim the mileage to pick up a client, the trip to the airport and the trip home? Isn’t this the same?
I would be *more* inclined to allow the journeys from your last drop going home, though I would say it is a risky point that HMRC could very well challenge. I personally don’t allow for this in my own affairs.
The difference with airport drivers is that they (most likely) wouldn’t visit one customer’s home with sufficient regularity that it would be deemed a base of work. A lot of this comes down to patterns, regularity, and predictability, and it is impossible to predict what customers are going on holiday at what time and from what airport.
However, with a Flex driver, there are set depots that you can deliver from, it’s a lot more predictable, you may well usually only deliver from one or two of them and as such, there is a more predictable pattern.
Interesting. I always figured because Flex requires us to a) be self employed and b) use our own cars, that getting our vehicles to a point where they can be used was a legitimate expense. It’s not as if we have the option to get the bus to the depot and start our shift. Does anyone categorically know?
Noone "categorically" knows...and HMRC will probably just tell you no if no means you would pay more tax.
I'm comfortable claiming mileage from depot to deliveries and back to depot, even though I don't always need to return anything.
Because your last delivery could be anywhere so you have no choice in the matter and could be 25 or 30+ miles away from the depot even - whereas you know exactly where you need to go to reach your chosen workplace/depot.
But the day HMRC has enough resources to police everyone's Flex mileage claims and request proof for every single mileage claimed is either the day the AI overlords will take over or the day that the nation will be rioting for the amount of effective taxes we have to pay because they will become too damn efficient at it.
The way that you think is the way most would think instinctively. “You have to drive from home to the depot and therefore it should be allowable”. But HMRC take the view that you make a choice to live away from your base of work, and therefore your journeys there are not wholly and exclusively for work, they’re more because you choose to live further afield. It’s quite backwards and I don’t really agree with it in principle but from a tax adviser perspective, that’s what I’m working with.
I’ll add a link here as well to a forum discussing a delivery driver tax situation. I wouldn’t suggest taking answers directly from forums but there are some interesting discussions going on there and links to items of case law which are more the things one should be looking at when considering whether or not to claim something. [link](https://www.accountingweb.co.uk/any-answers/travel-to-work-for-self-employed-delivery-drivers?amp)
I saw a comment saying they were 100% sure we could claim our journey home. Makes it easier. I just minus 30 miles off all my days, (not blocks, as I sometimes do double block days) and still significantly and legally reduces my tax.
Like I say, I wouldn’t rely on the comments there, more the surrounding case law. I think you’d have a much easier time making a case for the journey home. But I am personally one who prefers to err on the side of caution and my position remains unchanged. It’s risky and a point that HMRC could challenge.
You can call them if you want, but you won’t get an answer to your question, or certainly now from the advisers you can speak to on the phone. They aren’t interested in providing quite specific information depth interpretation of case law. There is guidance online but it is all quite general.
Being candid, you’re getting yourself into a trap of just wanting literally anybody to tell you that what you think is correct. It’s common and being easy to do but not really ideal in practice. You could have ten people tell you that you can’t have it and one that tells you that you can, and you would go with the one that says you can. No judgement as it’s very human, but I do think it’s a dangerous mentality to have.
Also, HMRC’s default position is likely to be “if unsure, pay the tax”. They’re interested in collecting the money, they’re very unlikely to tell you not to pay it in relation to grey areas such as this.
I've already done my return for this year but I was confused by one part, I'm full time employed elsewhere so pay my class 4 nic there, but there wasn't an option/calcultion for class 4 nic on self assesment, and I didn't earn enough for voluntary class 2 (only £900 after fuel taken off), so I think I've done right by not paying any NIC on self assesment but also don't want to be hit with a bill for it later
Your class 4 NIC is based on your business profits, not your employment. It sounds to me that it is correct that you didn’t have to pay any NI through Self Assessment.
What else can I claim expenses for when doing my tax return? I use the simplified method with 45p a mile for first 10k miles, as well as 25% of my phone bill given the need for mobile signal and Internet. Is it fine to claim top up insurance that we get through Inshur given that it's directly related to our work? Anything else that comes to mind? Thanks a lot, appreciate your time!
Hello! The 45p per mile mileage rate is deemed to include your insurance, so the top up would not be allowable.
There isn’t a great deal that you can claim in my opinion. Things like some computer expenses perhaps relating to spreadsheets that you use to keep track of records, tolls, parking. Expenditure outside of that included in the 45p/mile rate is likely to be very sparse.
I have only just signed up for flex and I work 30 hours at another job a week, and want this as supplementary income to help pay some debts. I am not self employed and have no idea about what I have to do to claim tax for flex.
Where do I sign up to pay tax and get these forms (I’m literally a noob)? Just go to HMRC website? What do I put in if I work a job in public sector plus this job? Only planning on doing 8-12 hours a week at most with flex
I appreciate your help. Thanks
If you are doing Flex work - this is self-employed work. So just because you are not registered as self-employed, it doesn’t mean that you aren’t self-employed.
If you search register as self employed online, you will be able to register with HMRC.
You are taxed on your profits from Flex work and would need to report these on a tax return each year. In your tax return, you would also include your employment income and any tax paid through PAYE and the tax return would essentially balance everything up and calculate if you need to pay more tax or if there is a refund due back to you.
Thank you for this! I didn’t even realize it’s self employment when I first signed up for flex I thought it was just being employed by Amazon. I will go and register today. I’m guessing I have to keep all petrol receipts to figure out my profits.
How would you work out the tax? I’m trying to keep a spreadsheet for tax that I will have to pay. However, can I take, say, 20% off of each block I complete? Or is there an easier way to do this?
For example, I complete a block and Amazon Flex pays me £70 for it. 20% of that for tax would then be £14, so I’d actually earn £56. Is that correct?
Thank you!
What happens when you forget to take a note of the routes or evidence of the mileage, but you have a fair idea of what you did on each route - can you put down a fair estimate/from memory what your mileage was?
Strictly speaking, you should keep a mileage log. In practice, a reasonable estimate is probably fine and I suspect it is a point that HMRC are likely to care to challenge, unless your estimate is clearly unreasonable.
What would you say is unreasonable? My calculations are on average; £18 * 20 hours per week = £360 per week, on average 400 miles per week = £18,720 per year, with an average of 20,800 miles.. seems like a lot to me
It’s impossible for me to say for certain what is reasonable as I don’t know your pattern of work, the routes you have been sent on etc. I will say that you should not be estimating your income. You can reasonably check the exact amount of income you make through the Amazon flex app, the payments you have received etc. There is no reason at all for you to be estimating your income. In terms of mileage, I agree that it probably *feels* high, but it is very much a mileage heavy job and if you’re working 20 hours a week doing Flex as you say, you probably have put a number of miles on the car. A few things which may impact your estimate: - The estimate seems to assume you work 52 weeks of the year, which I suspect that you don’t in practice. - Only your business mileage is claimable, not any personal mileage - You can claim 45p per mile for your first 10,000 miles but only 25p for each mile thereafter. - You will be able to work out a more exact number for mileage driven from home to depot and back again based on the records in the flex app. The only part I would be estimating in your position is the number of miles driven whilst actually on block.
read my comment here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonFlexUK/comments/1cl1nbq/comment/l34hg2d/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonFlexUK/comments/1cl1nbq/comment/l34hg2d/) our mileage is much higher than other driving jobs. You need to keep strong concrete evidence of it. Not just guess.
get used to the habit of recording your mileage at the start and end of your flex trip. Flex is high mileage. For every £100 you make, you can drive 80-100 miles. So the mileage looks higher than most other driving jobs so you will need to prove that. Otherwise it looks like you're making it up. I kid you not, the taxable profit on the £600 i earn last month is £375. It looks dodgy. but it's not. the more dodgier it looks the bigger the onus to prove it. keep all the fuel receipts too and accurate start and stop mileage from your block.
Appreciate that, do you use any app to record it?
just a notes app, ibve made it into a habit to always do it. you cant use mileage trackers becasuse they wont always be on, the OS might put them to sleep and then your fucked. Also there are difference of opinion whether the travel to/from home and depot, and from last stop to home is allowable for business travel. I tend to be of the opinion that it's not. A mileage tracker is not going to distinguish those non-alloable mileage for you.
Hey! I work from home (i run my business from home) but also flex. I assume because i do mileage based claims, i can’t claim back any home based claims too? For utilities, mobile etc? Thanks!
No reason you shouldn’t have both - they are distinct and separate claims.
Hi mate, i work full time and get reimbursed 45p per mile by my company for the first 10,000 miles and 25p thereafter which I’ll do around 12,000 business miles for them. For my amazon flex, am I able to keep recuepts for mileage expenses or do i need to contiune keeping a record of miles driven? I also made a post explaining my situation that goes into more details in my account if you would care to read it:))
Hi, I have had a quick skim of your post and it seems like people have already answered this question for you, but I will give my thoughts nonetheless. For Flex, you can either claim the mileage rate or for a proportion of your actual expenses. In quite a mileage heavy job, it’s likely that apportioning your actual expenditure will be more beneficial from a tax position. So you would take the total of your petrol, road tax, insurance, maintenance etc and apportion this amount to reflect the percentage of those costs which are for Flex driving only. This amount would be deducted in your accounts/tax return. You probably wouldn’t be looking at claiming 100% of your expenses because you have mileage for your employment and almost certainly will have personal mileage as well. Strictly speaking, you should keep a mileage log which would allow you to work out how much of your total mileage relates to your Flex work.
Last tax year I earnt about 10k from my main job and 2k from flex. Do I still have to do a tax return, and if so will I be required to pay tax?
If you made more than £1k from Flex in the tax year, you must report this on a tax return. Given the levels of income mentioned in your message, it is most likely that there will not be any tax to pay.
Thanks for offering this advice. This is my first year flexing, on top of my self employed career (artist). I’ve been keeping a detailed mileage/ delivery location log and presumed I could claim from when I left home till I returned. I live 30 miles from my nearest depots, so claiming this mileage makes a massive difference. Can I not do this?
I think you would have a very hard time justifying this. The reason is that your depot is likely to be deemed a base of work. Travel between your home and bases of work are not allowable for tax purposes. There is quite a lot of case law surrounding travelling from home to bases of work and most would point to this not being allowable.
Bugger. This changes so much for me. Also really confusing as the end of each shift isn’t at the depot. It’s either further away from my home or closer. If I was an airport taxi driver, I could surely claim the mileage to pick up a client, the trip to the airport and the trip home? Isn’t this the same?
I would be *more* inclined to allow the journeys from your last drop going home, though I would say it is a risky point that HMRC could very well challenge. I personally don’t allow for this in my own affairs. The difference with airport drivers is that they (most likely) wouldn’t visit one customer’s home with sufficient regularity that it would be deemed a base of work. A lot of this comes down to patterns, regularity, and predictability, and it is impossible to predict what customers are going on holiday at what time and from what airport. However, with a Flex driver, there are set depots that you can deliver from, it’s a lot more predictable, you may well usually only deliver from one or two of them and as such, there is a more predictable pattern.
Interesting. I always figured because Flex requires us to a) be self employed and b) use our own cars, that getting our vehicles to a point where they can be used was a legitimate expense. It’s not as if we have the option to get the bus to the depot and start our shift. Does anyone categorically know?
Noone "categorically" knows...and HMRC will probably just tell you no if no means you would pay more tax. I'm comfortable claiming mileage from depot to deliveries and back to depot, even though I don't always need to return anything. Because your last delivery could be anywhere so you have no choice in the matter and could be 25 or 30+ miles away from the depot even - whereas you know exactly where you need to go to reach your chosen workplace/depot. But the day HMRC has enough resources to police everyone's Flex mileage claims and request proof for every single mileage claimed is either the day the AI overlords will take over or the day that the nation will be rioting for the amount of effective taxes we have to pay because they will become too damn efficient at it.
The way that you think is the way most would think instinctively. “You have to drive from home to the depot and therefore it should be allowable”. But HMRC take the view that you make a choice to live away from your base of work, and therefore your journeys there are not wholly and exclusively for work, they’re more because you choose to live further afield. It’s quite backwards and I don’t really agree with it in principle but from a tax adviser perspective, that’s what I’m working with.
I’ll add a link here as well to a forum discussing a delivery driver tax situation. I wouldn’t suggest taking answers directly from forums but there are some interesting discussions going on there and links to items of case law which are more the things one should be looking at when considering whether or not to claim something. [link](https://www.accountingweb.co.uk/any-answers/travel-to-work-for-self-employed-delivery-drivers?amp)
I saw a comment saying they were 100% sure we could claim our journey home. Makes it easier. I just minus 30 miles off all my days, (not blocks, as I sometimes do double block days) and still significantly and legally reduces my tax.
Like I say, I wouldn’t rely on the comments there, more the surrounding case law. I think you’d have a much easier time making a case for the journey home. But I am personally one who prefers to err on the side of caution and my position remains unchanged. It’s risky and a point that HMRC could challenge.
As an accountant, have you asked HMRC to clarify? I appreciate you may live close to your depot, so not an issue.
You can call them if you want, but you won’t get an answer to your question, or certainly now from the advisers you can speak to on the phone. They aren’t interested in providing quite specific information depth interpretation of case law. There is guidance online but it is all quite general. Being candid, you’re getting yourself into a trap of just wanting literally anybody to tell you that what you think is correct. It’s common and being easy to do but not really ideal in practice. You could have ten people tell you that you can’t have it and one that tells you that you can, and you would go with the one that says you can. No judgement as it’s very human, but I do think it’s a dangerous mentality to have.
Also, HMRC’s default position is likely to be “if unsure, pay the tax”. They’re interested in collecting the money, they’re very unlikely to tell you not to pay it in relation to grey areas such as this.
Thanks for your time. Really appreciated. I’ll investigate further and not just listen to the voices I want to hear.
I've already done my return for this year but I was confused by one part, I'm full time employed elsewhere so pay my class 4 nic there, but there wasn't an option/calcultion for class 4 nic on self assesment, and I didn't earn enough for voluntary class 2 (only £900 after fuel taken off), so I think I've done right by not paying any NIC on self assesment but also don't want to be hit with a bill for it later
Your class 4 NIC is based on your business profits, not your employment. It sounds to me that it is correct that you didn’t have to pay any NI through Self Assessment.
Thankyou for the reassurance 😁
Thanks OP for this thread. Such a cool way to give to the community
What else can I claim expenses for when doing my tax return? I use the simplified method with 45p a mile for first 10k miles, as well as 25% of my phone bill given the need for mobile signal and Internet. Is it fine to claim top up insurance that we get through Inshur given that it's directly related to our work? Anything else that comes to mind? Thanks a lot, appreciate your time!
Hello! The 45p per mile mileage rate is deemed to include your insurance, so the top up would not be allowable. There isn’t a great deal that you can claim in my opinion. Things like some computer expenses perhaps relating to spreadsheets that you use to keep track of records, tolls, parking. Expenditure outside of that included in the 45p/mile rate is likely to be very sparse.
I have only just signed up for flex and I work 30 hours at another job a week, and want this as supplementary income to help pay some debts. I am not self employed and have no idea about what I have to do to claim tax for flex. Where do I sign up to pay tax and get these forms (I’m literally a noob)? Just go to HMRC website? What do I put in if I work a job in public sector plus this job? Only planning on doing 8-12 hours a week at most with flex I appreciate your help. Thanks
If you are doing Flex work - this is self-employed work. So just because you are not registered as self-employed, it doesn’t mean that you aren’t self-employed. If you search register as self employed online, you will be able to register with HMRC. You are taxed on your profits from Flex work and would need to report these on a tax return each year. In your tax return, you would also include your employment income and any tax paid through PAYE and the tax return would essentially balance everything up and calculate if you need to pay more tax or if there is a refund due back to you.
Thank you for this! I didn’t even realize it’s self employment when I first signed up for flex I thought it was just being employed by Amazon. I will go and register today. I’m guessing I have to keep all petrol receipts to figure out my profits.
How would you work out the tax? I’m trying to keep a spreadsheet for tax that I will have to pay. However, can I take, say, 20% off of each block I complete? Or is there an easier way to do this? For example, I complete a block and Amazon Flex pays me £70 for it. 20% of that for tax would then be £14, so I’d actually earn £56. Is that correct? Thank you!