The Home Office Allowance is a flat rate that you can claim if you’re self-employed and use your home for work. This is done through a system known as simplified expenses, and the amount of Home Office Allowance you can claim depends on how many hours you work from your home each month. This method is a simpler way of claiming home expenses back, as opposed to manually working out all your business costs.

How much Home Office Allowance can I claim if I work from home?

The amount of Home Office Allowance you can claim all depends on how often you work from home. The good news is that you don’t have to work out how much of your home is used for work. This gets really complicated if you’re claiming your home as an expense.

Here are the flat rates used:

The flat rate does not include telephone or internet expenses. You can claim the business proportion of these bills by working out the actual costs. HMRC has a simplified expenses checker that you can use to compare what you can claim using simplified expenses with what you can claim by working out the actual costs.

What counts as working from home?

Examples of what counts as working from home include:

• Any work you do for your clients or contractor
• Calculating and filing your taxes
• Sorting out your receipts and invoices
• And basically, anything else that’s work-related!

What HMRC actually cares about is that your ‘business use’ at home is reasonable. In most cases that means that it should be in line with what you earn from self-employment. 

For example, if you are a freelance copywriter who spends most of your time working from home and earns a full-time wage, then it’s likely that you can claim 40+ hours. On the other hand, an Uber driver who spends most of their time on the road is probably limited to a minimum of 25 (or even fewer) hours.