Expense Deduction Calculator for UK Freelance Journalists — Home Office, Mileage and Tax Saving
Freelance journalists routinely under-claim, mostly because working out the home office element and the mileage split is tedious enough to postpone until the January deadline. Most of the rates here are hardcoded and the home-office and tax-saving figures carry no date, so check each one against the tax year you are filing.
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Expense Deduction Calculator
Estimate your UK self-assessment deductible expenses and tax saving as a freelance journalist.
Home office method
Deductible expense breakdown
Home office (flat rate)£0.00Mileage allowance£0.00Equipment£0.00Professional subscriptions£0.00Accountant / legal fees£0.00Rail / flights / hotels£0.00
Total deductible£0.00
Estimated tax saving
Basic rate (20%)£0.00Higher rate (40%)£0.00Additional rate (45%)£0.00
Estimate only. Always confirm with a qualified accountant. Verify current HMRC mileage rates and flat rates at gov.uk before filing.
How it works
- Home office has two methods. Simplified converts days worked from home into monthly hours as days x 5 x 4 — a hardcoded five-hour day and four-week month — then bands them into HMRC flat rates of £26 a month at 101 hours or more, £18 at 51 to 100, £10 at 25 to 50, and nothing below 25, multiplied by 12. Actual cost apportions as (total annual home costs / number of rooms) x (days worked from home / 365).
- Mileage uses HMRC approved rates read from the site’s shared, dated rates file: 45p a mile for the first 10,000 miles and 25p a mile above that, added together. The 10,000-mile boundary itself is still a plain hardcoded number.
- Equipment, professional subscriptions, accountant and legal fees, and rail, flights and hotels are each taken exactly as you enter them. The tool does not test whether any of them are allowable — it only adds them up.
- The total deductible is the sum of all of the above, and the estimated tax saving is presented as flat 20%, 40% and 45% of that total, labelled basic, higher and additional rate.
When to use it
- Before a self-assessment deadline, to get a rough figure for the expenses side of the return.
- Comparing the simplified flat rate against actual-cost apportionment for your home office, to see which is worth the record-keeping.
- Working out whether a year of heavy travel justifies logging mileage properly.
- Estimating the after-tax cost of a piece of kit before you buy it.
What it does not do
- The days-to-hours conversion assumes a five-hour working day and a four-week month. A full-time freelance working five eight-hour days lands on 100 monthly hours and is offered the £18 band rather than the £26 one. Work out your real monthly hours and pick the band yourself.
- The mileage rates are read from the site’s shared, dated rates file, so they carry a checkable source. The £26 / £18 / £10 home-office flat rates, the 25 / 51 / 101 hour thresholds, and the 20 / 40 / 45 tax-saving percentages are still plain hardcoded numbers with no date attached. Verify all of them on gov.uk for the tax year you are filing.
- The 20 / 40 / 45% saving figures are rest-of-UK income tax rates. Scottish taxpayers have different bands entirely, and none of the figures allow for the personal allowance, Class 4 National Insurance, or the fact that a deduction only saves tax at your marginal rate on the slice of income it actually removes.
- Equipment is treated as a straight deduction. Capital items may need capital allowances instead, and there is no cash basis versus accruals switch, no private-use apportionment and no test of whether an expense is wholly and exclusively for the business. It totals what you type; deciding whether an expense is allowable is still your call.
- An estimate only, and not tax advice. The tool says so itself. Confirm with a qualified accountant before you file.
More tools
This is one of the free tools on UK JournoHub. See the full tools index for the rest.