Household Bills
Claim a year’s worth of WFH tax relief – for one day working at home
Guest Author:
Emma LunnEmployed workers who work from home can apply for tax relief to offset the extra electricity and heating expenses.
Although the tax relief is calculated weekly, you’re eligible for the whole year’s tax relief even if your employer requests you to work from home for just one day in the tax year.
Hundreds of thousands of people claimed the tax relief last year when the pandemic began – and they can now claim for this year too.
There are a couple of ways you can claim the cash, which amounts to £6 a week:
- Through your employer as a non-taxable benefit. This can be done via your usual expense claim which means cash will usually be paid straight to your bank account and without tax being deducted.
- By filling out a P87 form from the government. This will result in your tax code being altered.
Nimesh Shah, CEO at Blick Rothenberg, said: “HMRC have confirmed that employed workers can now claim the working from home allowance for the new tax year (2021/22), where they have worked at home for just one day because of the coronavirus restrictions.
“The £6 per week working from home allowance is worth £62 for basic rate (20%) taxpayers; £125 for higher rate (40%) taxpayers and £140 for additional rate (45%) taxpayers for the 2021/22 tax year.
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“HMRC relaxed the rules last year on who is eligible to claim the working from home allowance. Before the coronavirus pandemic, a worker could only claim the allowance in limited circumstances where their employer required them to work at home and for that specific period only.
“HMRC said that people could claim the working from home allowance for the entire 2020/21 tax year if they had worked at home for just one day because of the coronavirus restrictions preventing them from attending their place of work.”
HMRC has now confirmed that the same relaxed rule will apply for the 2021/22 tax year.
HMRC set up a new dedicated working-from-home microservice in October 2020. The service automatically applies the whole tax year’s relief via your tax code – making claiming the whole amount relatively easy. You’ll need to have your Government Gateway ID to make a claim but if you don’t have one, you can create one as part of the process.