Subsistence Tax Rebate: What You Can Claim From HMRC

A subsistence tax rebate is tax relief on food, drink and overnight costs you pay yourself while working at a temporary workplace. HMRC refunds the tax on what you spent, not the full amount. You claim direct from HMRC, online or by post, for the current tax year and the four before it.

The rule that decides almost every claim has nothing to do with what you ate. It’s whether the place you were working counts as temporary in HMRC’s sense of the word, which is narrower than the everyday one and rests on two separate tests rather than one.

This guide is for employees paid through PAYE who bought their own meals or accommodation and weren’t fully paid back.

Four things change the answer: how long you’ve been attending the site, how much of your working time you spend there, whether your employer reimbursed any of the cost, and whether you already file a Self Assessment return. Each one can turn a valid subsistence tax rebate into no claim at all.

What a subsistence tax rebate actually covers

Subsistence is the term the tax world uses for food, drink and overnight costs run up on a work journey. HMRC’s public guidance tends not to lead with the word, preferring food and overnight expenses, so you’ll meet both.

HMRC’s guidance on travel and overnight expenses lists what qualifies for tax relief when your job makes you travel:

• Food and drink bought while you are away from your normal workplace.
• Hotel accommodation where you have to stay overnight.
• Public transport costs.
• Congestion charges, tolls and parking fees.
• Business phone calls and printing costs.

Two of those deserve a second look. Accommodation sits under the same rules as meals, so a hotel bill and a sandwich are handled the same way rather than as separate claims. Business phone calls are allowable too, which matters if you’ve read elsewhere that calls made while away are always personal spending.

The travel expenses tax relief guide goes into the journey costs on that list in more depth.

Temporary workplace rules that decide your claim

No temporary workplace, no claim. GOV.UK is blunt about it: the daily journey between home and work earns no relief, and the one exception is a journey to somewhere that qualifies as temporary.

HMRC’s Employment Income Manual sets two separate questions. The first is whether you’re there for a job with a defined end point, or for some other reason that’s temporary by nature. If the answer is no, the workplace is permanent and nothing further applies.

The second question only arises if the first is satisfied. It strips the status away where two things coincide: you spend 40% or more of your working time at that place, and the stretch of work involved runs past 24 months, or looks set to.

Both parts have to be true before the workplace turns permanent. Spending 40% of your week at a site for eighteen months doesn’t do it. Neither does turning up one day a fortnight for five years.

The manual is explicit that the 40% and 24 month rule only converts workplaces that would otherwise be temporary, so it can’t be used to rule out a site that never qualified in the first place.

The word “likely” carries weight here. The test runs on what you expect at the time, not on how things actually turn out, so a contract extended beyond two years changes your position from the point your expectation changes.

The temporary workplace guide goes through the scenarios in more detail.

What counts as subsistence expenses

You claim for what you actually spent once the journey started. A meal bought after you set off is a subsistence expense.

A packed lunch made in your own kitchen is not, because no cost was incurred on it, and HMRC’s guidance to employers makes the same point from the other direction: an employee who buys no meal has nothing to be paid for.

You may have seen a set daily meal figure quoted as the HMRC subsistence allowance. Those are benchmark scale rates, and they’re a mechanism for employers rather than for you. They let a company reimburse staff a fixed amount without tax or National Insurance arising, provided the conditions are met.

They are not a flat rate an employee can claim from HMRC. Claiming direct means claiming the real cost, backed by receipts.

Treat the figures in circulation with care. EIM05231, the manual page those numbers come from, carries a note saying its guidance stops at the 2015/16 tax year, which is no basis for a claim today.

If your employer already pays you back

Reimbursement changes the arithmetic, and there are three positions rather than two:

• Your employer pays back the whole cost tax free, which leaves nothing to claim.
• Your employer covers part of the cost, leaving the shortfall as the figure you claim on.
• Your employer pays a round sum allowance that’s taxed with your salary, which HMRC’s manual treats as earnings rather than a reimbursement, so your qualifying costs are claimed separately on top.

The middle case is the one that gets skipped. Where your employer covers part of a cost tax free and you spent more than it paid, the gap is yours to claim.

Where the money arrived as a taxed allowance instead, the arithmetic differs, because that allowance was never a reimbursement to begin with. Keep the payslips either way, since they show how you were actually paid.

What your subsistence tax relief is worth

Relief is not a refund of the expense. You get back the tax you would otherwise have paid on that slice of your income, so your own rate decides the number.

GOV.UK’s worked example runs on a £60 claim: at a tax rate of 20%, the amount you are entitled to is £12.

Apply the same logic to a fortnight of site work. Say food cost you £14 a day across ten working days, none of it reimbursed, giving £140 of qualifying spend. At 20% the relief comes to £28. At 40% it comes to £56.

The spending is identical in both cases; what changes is the tax you would otherwise have paid.

A ceiling sits underneath every figure. Relief can’t come to more than the tax you paid in that year, and the P87 form puts the extreme case in one line: no tax paid means no refund. Work from the rate of tax you actually pay rather than assuming the basic rate applies.

Receipts and records HMRC asks for

Evidence is no longer something HMRC chases afterwards. Its published briefing on employment expense claims states that it checks the evidence and confirms whether you’re entitled to the relief, which reverses the older approach of paying first and checking later.

For meals and hotels the requirement is specific. Two things have to appear on any receipt you send: when you ate or stayed, and which restaurant or hotel it was.

A card statement line giving an amount and a date won’t carry that second piece.

Alongside the receipts, the P87 asks which employment the expenses belong to and what your employer paid back, so have the payslips to hand if an allowance was taxed with your wages.

Keeping a note of the dates you attended the site is sensible too, since the temporary workplace question is the one the whole claim rests on.

An accommodation tax rebate runs on the same evidence as a meal claim, which is why the two sit together in HMRC’s guidance instead of forming separate claims.

How to claim subsistence expenses from HMRC

Three conditions decide the shape of the claim whatever the route: you have to be within four years of the end of the tax year, you must have paid tax in that year, and your total expenses for the year need to be £2,500 or less.

Miss the last one and the claim moves to Self Assessment rather than disappearing.

Claiming online

HMRC’s online route takes the claim and the evidence together. An online iForm for employment expenses became available in late December 2024, following a period when the digital option was withdrawn and everything had to go by post.

Start from the GOV.UK check and claim service, which asks what you’re claiming for before it opens the form.

Claiming by post on form P87

Postal claims have to be on HMRC’s own form P87, and the GOV.UK guidance on claiming job expenses by post states that claims not using it are rejected.

Mandatory fields on the form are marked with an asterisk, and the form warns that anything arriving without them will be rejected.

When Self Assessment takes over

Two situations move the claim onto a tax return. Where your total expenses for a tax year come to more than £2,500, Self Assessment is the only route.

If you already complete a return for any other reason, you must claim through it rather than separately, whatever the amount involved.

Note what that £2,500 test measures. It runs on your total expenses claim for the tax year, not on the subsistence part alone, so mileage, tools and professional fees all count towards it.

The employment expenses guide covers those other categories, and the tax rebate guides index groups them by job and by cost type.

Before you claim your subsistence tax rebate

Almost every subsistence tax rebate turns on one question and falls down on one document. The question is whether the workplace was temporary once both parts of HMRC’s test are applied.

The document is a receipt that names the restaurant as well as the date. Settle the temporary workplace position first, because nothing else counts for much if that goes the wrong way. Gather the receipts next, along with the dates you attended the site and the payslips for anything that was reimbursed.

Check what your employer paid you before writing a figure down.

If you drove your own vehicle to the same site, the mileage allowance relief guide covers the part of the journey this page leaves out.

Key Takeaways

• A subsistence tax rebate is tax relief on food, drink and overnight costs you paid for yourself while working at a temporary workplace.
• A workplace only stops being temporary when both parts of the test are met: 40% or more of your working time, and a stretch of work at that site running past 24 months.
• Relief gives back the tax on what you spent rather than the spending itself, and it can’t be worth more than the tax you paid that year.
• Where an employer reimbursed part of the cost, the part they didn’t pay is still claimable.
• Receipts for meals and hotels have to show when you ate or stayed and which restaurant or hotel it was.
• Total expenses of £2,500 or less for a tax year can go online or by post on form P87, while anything above that, or any year you already file a return for, goes through Self Assessment.