£6 a Week, or Hundreds More?
I ask every UK remote worker I talk to about taxes the same question every January: if you work from home, how much do you get back? For most of them the answer is either £312, which is the employed flat rate for a full year, or nothing at all. And then there is a smaller group who claim over a thousand pounds, and half of them have never checked whether they were actually entitled to it.
Before I give you any numbers, one caveat, and it stays visible for the rest of the article. Claims about the employee home-working flat rate being removed from 6 April 2026 conflict across sources. Some third-party tax sites say it was removed. gov.uk and several tax tools still show the £6 per week flat rate as available. I am not going to tell you which one is right, because I am not going to sit on top of HMRC as the authority.
I use gov.uk and HMRC as the only authoritative source in this article. Readers must verify current status themselves before filing. This is not tax advice.
Two Routes, Completely Different Rules
There are two routes to the home office claim in the UK, and they apply to different people. One is for employed workers, and one is for self-employed workers. The rules, the thresholds, and the maximum amounts are different enough that picking the wrong route is how you lose hundreds of pounds a year.
The Employed Route
The HMRC flat rate is £6 a week, which is £312 a year for a full working year. You can only claim it if you pass the strict HMRC test, and the test has three parts: you must have no appropriate facilities to work, there must be a distance between you and where you normally work, and the nature of your work must require you to work from home.
The COVID-era easing of that test ended 6 April 2022. Since then, HMRC has been back to the strict requirement, and most employers have been providing appropriate facilities through the whole period. If your employer gave you a laptop and a workspace allowance, you most likely do not qualify.
The Self-Employed Route A: Simplified Expenses
Simplified expenses replace the flat rate for self-employed claims. The tiers are fixed, they sit against your weekly home-working hours, and they do not require receipts.
- £10 a month for 25 to 50 hours of home working a week.
- £18 a month for 51 to 100 hours of home working a week.
- £26 a month for 101 or more hours of home working a week.
The advantage of simplified expenses is that you do not need to work an area calculation or keep receipts for rent or utilities. You pick a tier and file a flat number. The cost is that you cannot exceed the tier you picked, even if your real home costs would justify more.
The Self-Employed Route B: Actual Costs
Actual costs give you a bigger number when your real costs are big enough. The calculation uses two apportionments: the room share and the time share.
Here is the worked example, and I have seen most variations of it in the past three years:
- A five-room home: four bedrooms plus one home office.
- Housing costs of £1,800 a month across rent, utilities, and household insurance.
- 24% working-time share, which is the share of a typical full week you actually spend working from home.
Now the arithmetic:
- £1,800 divided by 5 rooms, which is £360 per room per month.
- £360 multiplied by the 24% working-time share, which is £86.40 a month.
- £86.40 multiplied by 12, which is £1,036.80 a year.
Compare £1,036.80 with the simplified expenses top tier of £26 a month, or £312 a year. Actual costs is £724.80 a year higher for the same person, on the same home.
When Actual Costs Beats the Flat Tier
The break-even is easy to work. The flat top tier is £312 a year. For actual costs to beat it, your apportioned figure has to come out higher than £312, which means more than £26 a month once you run the room and time apportionments.
Most people with a mortgage or rent over £1,500 a month will beat the flat tier once they work more than about 40 hours a week from home. Most people on a modest rent will not. The two routes are not always in a race; often the flat tier is the honest winner and the actual costs paperwork is a trap for the time-poor.
One Table, All Three Routes
| Route | Applies to | Threshold or basis | Maximum value | Evidence needed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Employed flat rate | Employed workers only | Strict HMRC test, £6 per week | £312 a year | Self-declaration against the HMRC test |
| Self-employed simplified expenses | Self-employed workers | Tiers based on weekly home hours | £312 a year at £26 per month | Tier declaration, no receipts required |
| Self-employed actual costs | Self-employed workers | Room share times time share of real housing costs | Uncapped | Receipts and a documented calculation |
Two practical reads off that table. First, the £312 shows up twice, once as the employed ceiling and once as the self-employed simplified ceiling, and if you are self-employed the actual-cost route is what opens up above that line. Second, the evidence column tells you where most claims fall apart: the employed route is a self-declaration against a strict test, and the self-employed simplified route is a tier declaration, but the actual-cost route needs real receipts and a calculation you can defend.
The 26p Figure
The tax saved is what actually lands in your pocket. At the basic rate, each £1 of allowable expenses saves roughly 26p, which is 20% income tax plus 6% Class 4 national insurance, for a self-employed basic-rate taxpayer.
Run the numbers:
- £1,036.80 in allowable expenses saves roughly £270 a year at the basic rate.
- £312 in allowable expenses saves roughly £81 a year at the basic rate.
For a higher-rate taxpayer, the income-tax component rises from 20% to 40%, but Class 4 stays at 6% above the small-profits threshold, so the saving per pound does move. Do not stop at the £1,036.80 headline number, that is the claim, not the cash.
Two Related 2026 Changes
There are two adjacent 2026 changes that affect the home office claim even if they do not touch the flat rate directly.
Making Tax Digital applies from 6 April 2026 to gross self-employment and property income over £50,000. If your income is above that line, you have to file through MTD-compatible software and you cannot simply paper-file the home office claim alongside it.
The approved mileage rate rises to 55p per mile for the first 10,000 miles from 6 April 2026, up from 45p. That is the first rise since 2011, and for anyone who does client visits from home, it is the larger number of the two changes this year.
Neither of those changes touches the home office number directly. But both matter for the same reason: they push you toward keeping your records inside a system that HMRC recognises, rather than in a shoebox under the desk. If you are already on MTD software for another reason, add the home office claim to it, do not file it separately, and let the software carry the evidence you will need five years from now.
Records You Have to Keep
Keep your evidence until five years after the 31 January deadline for the tax year you are claiming. That is the record-keeping rule, and HMRC applies it strictly.
For an employed flat-rate claim, you need the self-declaration against the three-part HMRC test, and a note of any employer facilities you had.
For a simplified-expenses claim, you need the tier declaration, and a note of your typical home-working hours a week.
For an actual-costs claim, you need monthly housing receipts, a working-hours log, the room share and time share calculation, and a copy of the claim as filed.
If you are a self-employed taxpayer over £50,000, all of that has to sit inside your MTD-compatible software by 6 April 2026.
£312 or £1,036.80, Either Way It is Worth an Hour
This claim is small enough that most people leave it, and big enough that a serious self-employed worker can recover several hundred pounds a year for about an hour of work. Do the numbers once, verify the status of the employed flat rate against gov.uk and HMRC the week you file, and keep the receipts for five years.
The single biggest mistake I see is not picking a route. The employed route and the self-employed route are not interchangeable, and picking the wrong one means a smaller number. Confirm which one applies to you, work the actual-cost apportionment if you are self-employed and it pencils out, and keep the evidence until five years after the 31 January filing deadline for the tax year you claimed.