Home office expenses: what you can claim in 2026/27

If you are employed, the answer changed on 6 April 2026. Employees can no longer claim tax relief from HMRC for household costs of working from home that their employer has not reimbursed. The £6 a week claim that millions of people made during and after the pandemic no longer exists. The self-employed and limited companies are unaffected and can claim as before, and employers can still pay a homeworking employee £6 a week tax free. If you worked from home in any tax year from 2022/23 onwards and never claimed, you can still make a backdated claim, but the deadline for the earliest of those years is 5 April 2027.

That is situation with home office expenses in a nutshell and clarifies two things that are routinely confused. One is an employee deduction claimed from HMRC which has now been removed. The other is an employer payment made to the employee which survives, at £6 a week, tax free and National Insurance free.

All the details below are for the 2026/27 tax year. Income tax rates and bands apply in England, Wales and Northern Ireland as Scotland sets its own rates and bands.

Who can claim home office expenses?

What you can claim depends entirely on how you are engaged, and the three routes are very different from each other.

How you work	Can you claim household costs?	How
Self-employed, sole trader or partner	Yes	As an allowable business expense: simplified flat rate, or a proportion of actual costs
Director of your own limited company	Yes, through the company	The company pays you £6 a week tax free, or you charge it a licence fee under a written agreement
Employee	No, not from HMRC	Only if your employer chooses to reimburse you. There is no claim to make otherwise

 

The employee row is the one that changed. Section 360B of the Income Tax (Earnings and Pensions) Act 2003 now blocks a deduction for additional household expenses that an employer has not reimbursed, and it applies from 6 April 2026. It does not matter whether you were required to work from home, whether your household bills rose, or whether your employer refuses to pay — the deduction no longer exists.

Two things that were true before are still true. You cannot claim anything if you have paid no income tax in the year, because relief works by reducing tax you would otherwise pay. And you cannot claim for a cost your employer or your business has already covered.

What expenses can I claim money back on?

If you are self-employed

You can claim the business proportion of the costs of running your home, and the full cost of anything used only for the business.

Cost	Claimable?
Gas and electricity	Business proportion
Metered water	Business proportion. Unmetered water is normally not claimable
Rent	Business proportion
Mortgage interest	Business proportion. The capital repayment is never claimable
Council tax	Business proportion
Home insurance	Business proportion
Broadband and phone	Business proportion
Cleaning	Business proportion
Repairs to the room you work in	In full if the room is used for the business
Desk, chair, storage, shelving	In full, as capital expenditure, usually covered by the Annual Investment Allowance
Laptop, printer, monitor	In full if used only for the business, otherwise the business proportion
Stationery and postage	In full

 

The apportionment has to be defensible. The usual method is by rooms and by time: if you use one room of six as a workspace for eight hours of a sixteen hour waking day, the business share of a household bill is one sixth of half, not one sixth. Counting bathrooms, hallways and kitchens as rooms weakens the calculation, and HMRC does not accept an apportionment that produces an implausible result.

A room used only for business gives a cleaner claim, but it carries two costs described under “Important things to note” below, and for most people a room with some personal use is the better position overall.

If you run a limited company

The company is a separate person and the costs are yours, so the money has to move from the company to you. There are two ways, covered in detail further down.

If you are an employee

For household costs there is no longer a claim to make.

For equipment, an employee can in principle claim capital allowances on equipment, but only where the employer genuinely requires the employee to provide it themselves. HMRC’s own guidance says most employees cannot satisfy the test for a computer or laptop, and that an employee cannot succeed simply by arguing that what the employer supplied was inadequate. In practice these claims are refused.

What an employee can still claim is unaffected by the April 2026 change and includes travel to a temporary workplace, professional subscriptions to approved bodies, and the cost of maintaining specialist work clothing.

What is working from home tax relief?

The phrase now covers two different things, and using it loosely is how people end up claiming something that does not exist.

The employee deduction. Until 5 April 2026, an employee who had to work from home could deduct the additional household costs of doing so, either at cost with evidence or at a flat £6 a week without it. This was tax relief in the strict sense: it reduced taxable income, so £312 of relief across a year was worth £62.40 to a basic rate taxpayer and £124.80 to a higher rate taxpayer. This is the relief that was abolished on 6 April 2026.

The employer payment. Separately, an employer can pay a homeworking employee £6 a week, or £26 a month, without deducting income tax or National Insurance, and without either side having to justify the figure. This is not relief and it is not a deduction. It is cash, and it is worth the full £312 a year rather than the tax on it. It survives unchanged, and the employer can pay more than £6 if the employee can evidence higher additional costs.

The employer payment requires a homeworking arrangement, meaning an agreed pattern of working at home rather than the employee occasionally choosing to. HMRC accepts that a voluntary homeworking scheme can qualify, so a formal hybrid working policy is normally enough. An employer has no obligation to pay it, and many do not.

One rule survives both mechanisms: nothing can be claimed or paid tax free for a cost with a dual purpose unless the business share can be identified. Rent, council tax and a domestic broadband contract would have been paid anyway, which is why the employee flat rate was only ever aimed at the additional cost of heat, light and business calls.

How much can I get?

Self-employed: simplified expenses

If you work 25 hours or more a month from home, you can use a monthly flat rate instead of working out your actual costs.

Hours worked from home per month	Flat rate per month	Per year if claimed every month
25 to 50	£10	£120
51 to 100	£18	£216
101 or more	£26	£312

 

The flat rate covers heat, light and general household running costs. It does not cover telephone or broadband, which are claimed separately at their business proportion, and it does not cover rent or mortgage interest. For anyone working from home full time in a house with meaningful bills, the actual costs method usually produces a larger claim, at the price of keeping records.

The flat rate is a deduction from profit, so it is worth your marginal rate. A sole trader paying basic rate income tax and Class 4 National Insurance saves 26p for each £1 claimed, so the £312 top rate is worth about £81 a year.

Self-employed: the trading allowance alternative

The first £1,000 of trading income is tax free under the trading allowance. If your income is below £1,000 you have nothing to report. Above it, you can deduct the £1,000 allowance or your actual expenses, but not both, so it only helps if your total expenses are under £1,000.

Employees

From HMRC, nothing. If your employer pays the homeworking allowance, £6 a week is £312 a year in your pocket.

For context, and for the backdated claims described in the next section, these are the 2026/27 UK rates and bands.

Band	Taxable income	Rate
Personal allowance	Up to £12,570	0%
Basic rate	£12,571 to £50,270	20%
Higher rate	£50,271 to £125,140	40%
Additional rate	Over £125,140	45%

 

What changed on 6 April 2026

The employee deduction for unreimbursed homeworking costs was removed by a new section 360B inserted into ITEPA 2003. It prevents a deduction being made under section 336, which was the general provision the claim relied on.

The history matters only because it explains the scale of what has gone. The flat rate rose from £4 to £6 a week in April 2020. For 2020/21 and 2021/22 HMRC also relaxed the rules so that anyone required to work from home for even a single day because of the pandemic could claim for the whole tax year. Millions of claims followed. That relaxation of the rules ended on 5 April 2022, and from 2022/23 the strict test returned: the employee had to have no choice but to work at home, which excludes anyone whose employer provided a workplace they could have used.

Backdated claims are still open, with the time limit for claiming being four years from the end of the tax year. As at May 2026, that means you can still claim for 2022/23, 2023/24, 2024/25 and 2025/26 if you met the conditions in those years and never claimed. The 2022/23 window closes on 5 April 2027. A full year at £6 a week is £312 of relief, so four years is £1,248 of relief, worth £249.60 at basic rate and £499.20 at higher rate.

The conditions for those earlier years are the strict ones, not the pandemic ones. You must have been required to work from home, with no alternative workplace available, and your employer must not have reimbursed you. Choosing to work from home does not qualify, and neither does a hybrid arrangement where a desk was available to you.

Backdated claims are made on form P87, online or by post.

Claiming when you own your business

Self-employed, sole traders and partnerships

Claim through your Self Assessment return, using either the simplified flat rate or actual costs apportioned as described above. Partnerships report on the partnership return, with each partner’s share flowing to their own return.

If your gross income from self-employment and property was over £50,000 in 2024/25, you are within Making Tax Digital for Income Tax from 6 April 2026 and must keep digital records and file quarterly updates. That changes how you record the expense, not whether you can claim it.

Limited companies

There are two routes, and they are not alternatives of equal weight.

The £6 a week payment. The company pays you £6 a week or £26 a month. It is tax free in your hands, free of National Insurance for both of you, and deductible for the company against corporation tax. No records, no evidence, no agreement beyond a homeworking arrangement. For most one-person companies this is the sensible answer, and the £312 a year saves the company about £59 in corporation tax at 19%.

A licence agreement. If your actual costs are materially higher, you can charge the company a licence fee for the use of part of your home. The company deducts the fee from its profits. The fee is taxable on you personally as property income, and you deduct your own costs of providing the space against it, so the arrangement is normally set up to break even for you and to give the company the deduction.

Three conditions decide whether it works:

• It must be in writing. Without a written licence agreement, HMRC can treat the payments as additional salary, taxable as earnings and liable to National Insurance for both you and the company.
• The amount must be justifiable. It should be built from the actual costs of the space: the proportion of heat, light, insurance, council tax, cleaning and either rent or mortgage interest attributable to the area and the time used. A round number chosen to suit the company’s profits is not defensible, and HMRC can disallow the whole amount rather than reduce it.
• The licence should not give the company exclusive use. Exclusive business use is what triggers the capital gains problem described below.

Whatever the arrangement, mortgage capital repayments are never an allowable cost, and you cannot charge the company rent for a property and simultaneously treat that part of the property as wholly private.

Claiming when you are employed

The HMRC route is closed for household costs from 6 April 2026. What remains is your employer.

Ask to be paid the homeworking allowance. £6 a week, tax free, with no records needed by either side. Your employer is not obliged to agree, and the decision rests on your contract and their policy, but the administrative cost to them is close to nil and the payment is deductible for them.

Ask for more than £6 if your costs justify it. The exemption is not capped at £6. That is simply the figure HMRC accepts without evidence. Higher amounts can be paid tax free where the additional costs are evidenced.

Ask for equipment rather than money. If the employer buys the desk, chair or laptop and lends it to you for work, there is no tax charge on you provided any private use is insignificant, and the employer gets the deduction. This is nearly always better than buying it yourself and trying to claim, because as an employee you almost certainly cannot.

Make any backdated claim before the deadline. See the section above. The four-year window is the only remaining route to money from HMRC for homeworking costs, and the oldest year closes on 5 April 2027.

Important things to note

Exclusive business use can cost you more than it saves. Private residence relief normally takes the whole gain on your main home out of capital gains tax. Where part of the property is used exclusively for business, the gain is apportioned and the business part loses the relief. Keeping some personal use of the room preserves the relief in full, and for most people that is worth far more than the slightly larger expense claim that exclusive use would allow.

Business rates are a separate risk. Using a room in your home for work does not usually attract business rates. A part of the property adapted or used exclusively for business can, particularly where customers visit, staff are employed on site, or goods are sold. Converted outbuildings are the common trigger.

Council tax is claimable for the self-employed, not for employees. The live distinction matters: a sole trader can include the business proportion of council tax in an actual-costs claim, whereas an employee never could, even before April 2026.

Nothing is claimable twice. If the company pays you £6 a week, you cannot also claim those costs elsewhere. If you claim the trading allowance, you cannot claim expenses.

Keep the records if you use actual costs. Bills, the room count, the hours, and the basis of the apportionment. The flat rate exists precisely so that people who do not want to keep records do not have to.

Furloughed workers and the pandemic rules are history. Both the furlough scheme and the whole-year pandemic claims ended years ago and have no application to any year still open for claiming.

Frequently asked questions

Can employees still claim the £6 a week working from home allowance?

No. From 6 April 2026 an employee cannot claim tax relief from HMRC for household costs of working from home that the employer has not reimbursed. The £6 a week figure still exists, but only as an amount an employer can pay tax free.

Can I still claim for previous years?

Yes, for up to four years back, if you met the conditions at the time. As at May 2026 that covers 2022/23 to 2025/26, and the 2022/23 claim must be made by 5 April 2027. You must have been required to work from home in those years, with no workplace available to you, and not have been reimbursed.

Does the change affect the self-employed?

No. Sole traders, partners and limited companies are unaffected. The change is confined to the employee deduction, and the simplified expenses flat rates of £10, £18 and £26 a month are unchanged.

Can my employer still pay me for working from home?

Yes. An employer can pay £6 a week or £26 a month tax free and free of National Insurance, and more than that where the additional costs are evidenced. This was not affected by the April 2026 change.

Can I claim for a laptop or a desk if I am employed?

Almost certainly not. HMRC’s guidance is that most employees cannot meet the test, and that arguing the employer’s equipment was inadequate does not succeed. The better route is to ask the employer to buy the equipment and lend it to you, which is tax free to you and deductible for them.

Will claiming for a home office affect capital gains tax when I sell?

Only if part of your home is used exclusively for business. Where there is some personal use of the room, private residence relief is preserved in full. This is the main reason not to set aside a room solely for work.

Can I charge my own company rent for my home office?

Yes, under a written licence agreement, with the fee built from the actual costs of the space. The fee is taxable on you as property income and deductible for the company. Without a written agreement HMRC can treat the payments as salary, and an amount that cannot be justified from real costs can be disallowed entirely.