Getting your business mileage record keeping right is not optional — it is an HMRC requirement. If you claim mileage expenses through self-assessment, a P87 form, or your limited company accounts, HMRC expects a detailed, contemporaneous log of every business journey you make. Estimates, round numbers, and annual totals are not enough.
This guide covers exactly what HMRC requires in your mileage records for 2026/27, the new Making Tax Digital obligations taking effect from April 2026, and how HMRC actually checks claims during compliance enquiries.
What HMRC Expects You to Record for Every Journey
For each business journey, HMRC requires five pieces of information:
- Date — the specific date of the trip, not a weekly or monthly summary.
- Start location — where you departed from (e.g. “Home — 14 Park Lane, Leeds” or “Office — Queen Street, Bristol”).
- Destination — where you travelled to (e.g. “Client site — Greenfield Industrial Estate, Birmingham”).
- Business purpose — a specific reason for the journey, not just “work” or “client visit”.
- Miles driven — the actual distance for that individual trip, or odometer start and end readings.
Every element matters. A record missing the start location, for example, is incomplete. A vague purpose like “business” gives HMRC nothing to verify against. The strongest records include postcode-level detail for locations and name the client or project for the purpose.
Good example: “14 March 2026 — Home (LS6 2PQ) to ABC Engineering, Unit 7 Riverside Park, Sheffield (S3 8BT) — quarterly account review — 38 miles.”
Weak example: “March — various client visits — approx 400 miles.”
The first would survive an enquiry. The second almost certainly would not.
Digital vs Paper Records: What Counts as Compliant
HMRC currently accepts both paper and digital mileage records, provided they contain the five required fields. However, digital records have clear advantages — they cannot be lost in a house move, they are easily backed up, and they produce structured reports that HMRC inspectors can review quickly.
Paper logs are fragile. A shoebox of handwritten notes from three years ago is difficult to present if HMRC opens an enquiry. A digital export — a clean PDF or CSV covering the relevant tax year — is far more credible.
Tripbook automatically captures every journey with GPS tracking, recording the date, route, distance, and allowing you to add the business purpose. This creates the contemporaneous digital record HMRC requires without any manual data entry after the trip.
Making Tax Digital: Mandatory Digital Records from April 2026
The landscape is changing significantly. Making Tax Digital for Income Tax Self Assessment (MTD for ITSA) takes effect from 6 April 2026 for self-employed individuals and landlords with combined gross income above £50,000. From April 2027, the threshold drops to £30,000, and from April 2028 it falls further to £20,000.
Under MTD, you must:
- Keep accounting records digitally using HMRC-compatible software — spreadsheets or approved apps.
- Submit quarterly updates to HMRC with income and expenditure summaries (deadlines fall on the 7th of the month after each quarter ends).
- File a Final Declaration by 31 January following the end of the tax year, replacing the traditional self-assessment return.
- Maintain digitally linked records — data must flow between systems without manual re-keying.
For mileage, this means your journey records must exist in digital form from the point of capture. You cannot keep a paper notebook and type it up later — that breaks the digital linkage requirement. An app that records journeys in real time and exports to your accounting software is the most straightforward way to meet this obligation.
The first year (2026/27) includes a soft-landing period where HMRC will not issue penalty points for late quarterly submissions. But the requirement to keep digital records applies from day one. There is no grace period for record-keeping itself.
If you are a sole trader approaching these thresholds, our guide to Making Tax Digital and mileage tracking explains the full compliance requirements.
How HMRC Checks Mileage Claims During an Enquiry
Many people assume HMRC simply accepts whatever figure appears on a tax return. In reality, HMRC has several methods to verify mileage claims — and they use them routinely during compliance checks.
Google Maps cross-referencing. HMRC officers enter your reported start and end locations into Google Maps to check whether the claimed mileage is plausible. If you claim 45 miles for a journey that Google Maps shows as 28 miles, you will be asked to explain the difference.
Client invoices and business diaries. Your mileage log should align with your invoicing records. If you invoiced a client in Manchester on 12 March, HMRC expects to see a corresponding journey entry around that date. Mileage entries with no matching business activity raise questions.
MOT certificates and service records. Your vehicle’s total annual mileage (visible on MOT certificates) provides a ceiling figure. If your car covered 8,000 miles in total but you claim 12,000 business miles, the arithmetic fails immediately.
Fuel receipts and bank statements. While fuel receipts are not required for mileage claims at the AMAP rate, HMRC may review them to confirm you were actually purchasing fuel consistent with the distances claimed.
If your records cannot withstand this scrutiny, HMRC can reduce or disallow your entire mileage claim, charge interest on underpaid tax, and impose penalties for careless or inaccurate record-keeping — up to 30% of the tax underpaid for carelessness, or higher for deliberate inaccuracies.
Common Red Flags That Attract HMRC Attention
Certain patterns in mileage claims are known to trigger closer examination:
- Round numbers. Claiming exactly 10,000 miles every year looks like an estimate, not a measured figure. Genuine mileage totals are rarely round.
- Claiming right up to the 10,000-mile threshold. The AMAP rate drops from 45p to 25p after 10,000 miles. Claims that land precisely at 9,950 or 10,000 miles year after year invite scrutiny.
- No separation of personal and business journeys. If every journey in your log is marked as business, with no personal trips recorded, HMRC will question whether the log is genuine.
- Reconstructed records. Logs clearly written in one sitting (same pen, same handwriting style throughout) rather than contemporaneously are a red flag. Digital records timestamped at the point of travel are far more convincing.
- Mileage inconsistent with business type. A home-based consultant claiming 25,000 business miles raises different questions than a travelling sales representative claiming the same figure. HMRC considers what is reasonable for your profession.
- Missing or vague purposes. Entries like “meeting” or “site visit” repeated dozens of times without client names or project details suggest the log was filled in from memory rather than recorded at the time.
Tripbook removes most of these risks automatically. GPS tracking means distances are measured rather than estimated, timestamps prove the record was made at the time of travel, and the structured format ensures no required field is left blank.
How Long You Must Keep Mileage Records
HMRC record retention requirements depend on your tax status:
- Self-employed and sole traders: Keep records for 5 years after the 31 January submission deadline. For 2026/27 tax year records, that means retaining them until at least 31 January 2033.
- Limited companies: Keep records for 6 years from the end of the accounting period they relate to.
- Employees claiming Mileage Allowance Relief: HMRC can enquire into a return for up to 4 years after the filing deadline, so keep records for at least that long.
The safest approach is to retain all mileage records for six years regardless of your status. Digital records make this trivial — a cloud-backed app stores years of journey data without you needing to maintain physical files.
HMRC can also open an enquiry outside the normal window if they suspect deliberate error — up to 20 years in fraud cases.
Getting Your Records Right Before April 2026
If you have been relying on paper records, estimates, or end-of-year reconstructions, now is the time to change. The combination of existing HMRC requirements and the new MTD digital record-keeping obligations means that a proper mileage tracking system is no longer a nice-to-have — it is a compliance necessity.
Review what you currently record against the five required fields. Consider whether your method would survive the cross-referencing checks described above. If there are gaps, switching to automated GPS tracking closes them immediately.
For a ready-made spreadsheet format you can use alongside digital tracking, see our HMRC mileage log template. To understand the rates you claim at, our guide to the HMRC mileage rate for 2026/27 has the current figures. And if you are filing mileage on your self-assessment return, our walkthrough on claiming mileage through HMRC self-assessment covers the process step by step.
Download Tripbook from the App Store to start building HMRC-compliant mileage records automatically — GPS tracking, digital exports, and cloud backup included.
