Working from home tax relief ended for employees on 6 April 2026. What you can still claim, the four back years, and the self-employed rules.
If you have been claiming the £6 a week working from home tax relief every April without really thinking about it, stop. The claim you made last year was almost certainly your last one.
Working from home tax relief for employees ended on 6 April 2026. Not narrowed, not tightened, ended. HMRC removed the deduction entirely for anyone whose employer does not reimburse them. What is left is a smaller set of things that still work, plus a four year window on the back years that most people have never used.
It let an employee who was required to work from home reduce their taxable income by the extra household costs that working from home created, either £6 a week with no receipts or the exact amount spent with evidence.
The legal basis was section 336 of the Income Tax (Earnings and Pensions) Act 2003, which allows a deduction for expenses a job forces you to incur. HMRC then layered an administrative easement on top: a flat £4 a week from the 2011 to 2012 tax year, rising to £6 a week from 2020 to 2021. The easement is what nearly everybody used, because it needed no paperwork.
At Budget 2025 the government announced it was removing the relief. The measure inserts a new section 360B into Chapter 11 of Part 4 of ITEPA 2003, and it disallows any deduction from earnings for additional household expenses where those expenses are not reimbursed by the employer. It took effect from 6 April 2026.
HMRC’s policy paper is blunt about why. After checking claims, more than half were found to be ineligible. The relief was being claimed by large numbers of people who chose to work from home rather than being required to, and policing that was costing more than the relief was handing out.
The effect is small per person and large in aggregate. HMRC estimates it affects about 300,000 individuals, at £62 a year for a basic rate taxpayer and £124 a year for a higher rate taxpayer. The Exchequer expects to collect £10 million in 2026 to 2027 and £30 million the year after.
So for the 2026/27 tax year, the answer to “can I claim working from home tax relief” is no, if you are an employee carrying the cost yourself.
Worth pausing on the arithmetic, because the number people remember is £6 and the number that reached their bank account was much smaller.
Claiming £6 a week never put £6 a week in your pocket. It reduced your taxable income by £6 a week, so you saved tax at your marginal rate on £312 a year.
Scotland matters here because Scottish income tax rates are set separately at Holyrood. For 2026/27 the Scottish bands run from a 19% starter rate up to a 48% top rate, so a Scottish taxpayer on the higher rate was getting slightly more from this relief than an English or Welsh one, and is losing slightly more now.
Three things survived the change.
The relief is gone for 2026/27, but GOV.UK is explicit that you can still claim for the four previous tax years. That means 2022/23, 2023/24, 2024/25 and 2025/26 are all still open, provided you were genuinely eligible.
HMRC’s four year limit runs from the end of the tax year, so the 2022/23 claim closes on 5 April 2027 and each earlier year has already gone. Here is what I would check first if I had ever been required to work from home.
Worked example. You are a basic rate taxpayer whose employer closed its regional office, so you were required to work from home for the whole of 2023/24, 2024/25 and 2025/26. Three years at £312 of relief each is £936 of deduction, worth £187.20 in cash at 20%. Add 2022/23 if it applied and you are over £240. That is a real number for about ten minutes of form filling.
Eligibility for the back years is the same strict test it always was. You can claim if you had to work from home, for example because your job required you to live far from the office, or your employer had no office at all. You cannot claim if you chose to work from home, and GOV.UK spells out that this includes the case where your contract simply lets you work from home some of the time, and the case where the office was full so you could not go in. Hybrid by preference never qualified.
You also need evidence. For 2022 to 2023 onwards HMRC requires you to send evidence that you had to work from home, and if you are claiming the exact amount rather than the flat rate, receipts or bills as well.
This is the part most people miss. The change removed the employee’s ability to claim a deduction. It did not touch the employer’s ability to reimburse. HMRC’s policy paper says so directly: employers can still reimburse homeworking costs where eligible, without deducting income tax or National Insurance.
So if you are required to work from home, the question to put to your employer is no longer “can I claim this from HMRC” but “do you operate a homeworking allowance”. HMRC’s own impact note even anticipates that employers may come under pressure to change their reimbursement policies because of this change. That makes it a reasonable thing to raise.
Working from home was one item on a longer list, and the rest of the list is untouched. You can still claim tax relief on uniforms, work clothing and tools, professional fees and subscriptions, vehicles you use for work, travel and overnight expenses, and buying other equipment you genuinely need for the job.
If you have never claimed any of these, the route is form P87, and we have walked through that process in our guide to the P87 form for work expenses.
The removal applies to employees. Sole traders and other self-employed people sit in a different part of the tax code, and their home-use deduction is untouched.
You have two options. Work out the actual business proportion of your household costs, or use HMRC’s simplified expenses flat rate, which is based on the hours you work from home each month. You can only use simplified expenses if you work 25 hours or more a month from home.
| Hours of business use per month | Flat rate per month |
|---|---|
| 25 to 50 | £10 |
| 51 to 100 | £18 |
| 101 and more | £26 |
The flat rate does not cover phone or internet. You claim those separately, at the business proportion of the actual bills.
Worked example. You are a freelance designer working about 110 hours a month from a spare room, every month of the year. That is £26 a month, so £312 a year off your taxable profit. On a profit of £40,000 in 2026/27 you are paying 20% income tax and 6% Class 4 National Insurance at the margin, so £312 of deduction is worth roughly £81 in cash. Modest, but it is one line on the return.
If your actual costs are clearly higher, the actual-cost method will beat the flat rate, and HMRC publishes a simplified expenses checker that compares the two for you.
Three steps, in this order.
If you complete a Self Assessment return, back-year claims go through the return rather than the standalone claim service on GOV.UK.
Changed: the employee deduction for non-reimbursed household costs, removed on 6 April 2026.
Not changed: employer reimbursement, self-employed home-use expenses, and every other employment expense category. The personal allowance is still £12,570 for 2026/27 and the higher rate threshold is still £50,270, both frozen, so losing £62 or £124 lands on top of a tax position that was already tightening year on year.
If you want to see what a change like this does to your actual monthly take-home rather than your annual tax bill, the NetPay app works it out from your real pay figures, including your tax code, National Insurance, pension and student loan. Free to download.
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No, not as an employee paying the costs yourself. The deduction for non-reimbursed household expenses was removed from 6 April 2026, so there is nothing to claim for the 2026/27 tax year. You can still claim for the four previous tax years if you were genuinely required to work from home in them.
Claiming the flat £6 a week reduced your taxable income by £312 a year, so you saved tax at your marginal rate on that amount. A basic rate taxpayer got about £62 a year and a higher rate taxpayer about £124. HMRC used those same two figures in its own impact assessment of the change.
Yes. GOV.UK confirms you can still claim for the four tax years before 2026/27, which are 2022/23, 2023/24, 2024/25 and 2025/26. HMRC's four year limit runs from the end of each tax year, so the 2022/23 claim window closes on 5 April 2027. You must send evidence that you had to work from home.
No. The removal applies only to the employee deduction. Sole traders and other self-employed people can still claim either the actual business proportion of their household costs or HMRC's simplified flat rate of £10, £18 or £26 a month depending on hours worked from home.
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A note on financial advice: NetPay UK calculates take-home pay based on official HMRC tax rules. This article reflects rules in force at the time of publication (19 September 2026). Tax rules change. For complex situations, consult a qualified UK accountant or visit gov.uk/income-tax.
