Working From Home Tax Relief: The Claim Window Is Closing

If you were required to work from home at any point since April 2022 and never got round to claiming the relief, this is the part where the clock becomes the story. HMRC's working at home guidance now opens with a sentence that changes the whole calculation:

There is no claim to make for the year you are living in. There are four behind you, and they expire one at a time. This guide is about getting those four, not about the allowance mechanics, which our working from home allowance page covers in full.

All figures are estimates based on published rates. Confirm your own position with HMRC.

First: are you the employee or the sole trader?

These two things share a name and almost nothing else, and getting them confused wastes an afternoon.

Sole traders use HMRC simplified expenses, a monthly flat rate based on hours worked at home, or apportioned actual costs. That is a deduction from trading profit, not employment tax relief, and nothing on this page restricts it. See use of home as office for that route.

The rest of this guide is the employee claim.

Who actually qualifies

The eligibility bar rose sharply after the pandemic and most people have not caught up with it. HMRC's wording is short and unforgiving.

You can claim "if you have to work from home, for example because: your job requires you to live far away from your office" or "your employer does not have an office".

You cannot claim "if you choose to work from home. This includes if: your employment contract lets you work from home some or all of the time" or "your employer has an office, but you cannot go there sometimes because it's full".

Read that second block carefully, because it rules out the most common modern arrangement. A hybrid contract that permits home working is explicitly a choice, not a requirement. A full office on your Tuesday is a full office, not a qualifying reason.

The claims that do stand up are the ones where there is genuinely nowhere else to go: an employer with no office at all, a role based too far from the nearest office to commute daily, or a period when working from home was legally required.

What it is worth

You have two options. HMRC's wording: "You can either claim tax relief on: £6 a week" or "the exact amount you've spent."

The flat rate. £6 a week is £312 across a full tax year. You do not receive £312. You receive tax relief on it, which is £312 multiplied by your marginal rate.

HMRC's own worked example: "If you pay the 20% basic rate of tax and claim tax relief on £6 a week, you would get £1.20 per week in tax relief (20% of £6)."

Actual costs. You can instead claim what you genuinely spent on work, which HMRC illustrates as "business phone calls" and "gas and electricity for your work area". The important limit is the next sentence: "You cannot claim for things that you use for both private and business use, such as rent or broadband access."

That single rule is why the actual-cost route disappoints most employees. Rent is out. Broadband is out. What remains is the marginal heat, light and power attributable to the room you work in, plus work calls, and evidencing that credibly for four separate years is real effort for a figure that often lands near £312 anyway.

For most employees the flat rate is the right answer. For a full year of genuine, required home working in a cold house on a higher-rate salary, actual costs can beat it.

Four claimable years, four deadlines

The general time limit for a tax claim is four years from the end of the tax year concerned, traced by HMRC's Self Assessment Claims Manual to TMA 1970 s43. HMRC's working at home page states the same reach: "You can claim for this tax year and the 4 previous tax years", now qualified by the 2026/27 closure.

A basic rate taxpayer who qualified for all four years and never claimed is looking at roughly £250 of tax relief in one submission. A higher rate taxpayer, roughly £500. Claims are made per year, so a partial year is claimed at the appropriate proportion rather than abandoned.

How to claim, and the evidence rule people trip on

Claims go through HMRC's online employment expenses service, or by post on form P87. HMRC's instruction for anyone in Self Assessment is separate: "If you complete a Self Assessment tax return, you must claim through your tax return instead."

Then the rule that catches people out. HMRC states: "When you claim, you must send evidence that you have to work from home if you're either claiming: £6 a week for the tax year 2022 to 2023 or later" or "the exact amount you've spent". And "If you're claiming the exact amount you've spent, you will also need to send evidence such as a copy of your receipts or bills."

This is a change from the pandemic years, when the flat rate was waved through. Every year still claimable now falls inside the evidence requirement, so you need something showing the requirement to work from home. In practice that means a contract or written statement of terms specifying home as your workplace, a letter or email from your employer confirming there is no office you can attend, or documentation of a relocation or role change that made office attendance impossible.

A practical sequence:

1. Decide, honestly, whether "have to" describes each year. Do not claim years where you chose to.
2. Gather the evidence for those years before you start. The service will ask.
3. Choose flat rate or actual costs. If actual costs, gather bills as well, and remember rent and broadband are excluded.
4. Submit each year in the same claim.
5. Watch your tax code. Relief for the current year is often given by adjusting your code, but with 2026/27 closed to this relief, backdated years are normally repaid instead.

What happens to your tax code afterwards

Employment expense relief has a habit of leaving a footprint in your code, and it is worth knowing about because it produces its own errors later.

Where HMRC gives relief through your code rather than as a repayment, it adds the amount to your tax free allowance, which nudges the code upward. That is correct while the relief applies. What goes wrong is the following year, when the relief no longer applies and the addition stays. You then have too much tax free pay and a small underpayment builds quietly.

With the relief now withdrawn for 2026/27, this is a live risk: if your current code still contains a working from home addition, that addition should not be there. Check the breakdown in your Personal Tax Account, or run your code through our free tax code checker to see whether the code you are on matches your circumstances for the current year.

Our guide to what to do about a wrong tax code covers how to get it corrected.

If you are also owed money for other reasons

Working from home relief is rarely the only thing sitting unclaimed. The same four-year window covers uniform and tool flat rates, professional fees, Marriage Allowance, and any overpayment caused by a wrong tax code. Those are separate claims, but they are separate claims you can make in the same week.

• Am I due a tax rebate? runs ten diagnostic checks
• How to claim a tax refund from HMRC sorts you onto the right route for each
• Reclaim overpaid tax walks the full four-year recovery
• Tools and union fees and the uniform tax rebate cover the other flat rates

And if your home working is self-employment rather than employment, the working from home allowance page sets out the simplified expenses rates and the actual cost apportionment, neither of which is affected by the change above.