How to Claim Mileage as a Sole Trader Tradesperson — and Get Paid What You're Owed
If you drive a van for your trade business, mileage is one of your most significant deductible expenses. But tracking it correctly is the difference between a tax rebate and a tax penalty.
Whether you are a plumber doing emergency callouts across London, an electrician wiring a new build in Sydney, or a carpenter traversing rural Canada, your vehicle is your lifeline. Fuel, wear and tear, and maintenance cost money. Tax authorities recognize this, which is why they allow you to claim mileage expenses.
Official Tax Rates for Mileage
Instead of keeping every single fuel receipt and calculating depreciation, most tax authorities allow you to use a simplified flat rate based on the distance traveled for business purposes.
- UK (HMRC): 45p per mile for the first 10,000 miles (25p thereafter).
- Australia (ATO): 88c per kilometre (for the 2024-2025 income year).
- New Zealand (IRD): $1.04 per kilometre for the first 14,000km.
- Canada (CRA): 70¢ per kilometre for the first 5,000km.
Business Travel vs. Personal Travel
You cannot claim mileage for commuting from your home to a regular place of work (like a long-term site you visit every day). However, as an itinerant worker (a tradesperson who travels to different clients daily), journeys from your home to a temporary workplace are fully deductible. Travel between job sites or to the merchant is also deductible.
The Compliance Problem
If you are ever audited, you need a logbook. Tax authorities will not accept a rough guess. You need to record the date, purpose of the journey, distance traveled, and the start and end locations. Writing this down in a paper diary is tedious, and often forgotten until the night before the tax deadline.
Automating Your Mileage Claims
- Use a digital tracker: Log your trips on your phone as they happen.
- Allocate costs to jobs: If you drive to a merchant for materials meant for Job A and Job B, you need a way to split the vehicle expense across both jobs to calculate true job profitability.
VanLog's Contractor Pro plan features a smart mileage tracker. It uses the official tax authority rates based on your region (set during sign-up). You can log journeys instantly and, uniquely, allocate the cost percentage of a journey across multiple active jobs. At the end of the year, generating your mileage log for your accountant takes one click.