Expenses and benefits: sporting or recreational facilities

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1. Overview

As an employer paying for sporting or recreational facilities for your employees, you have certain tax, National Insurance and reporting obligations.

This includes:

sporting or recreational facilities that you provide directly, eg a gym
vouchers that can be exchanged for the use of sporting or recreational facilities

You won’t have to report anything to HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) or pay tax and National Insurance if the facilities:

are available for use by all of your employees
aren’t available to the general public
are used mainly by employees, former employees or members of employees’ families and households (employees of any companies you’ve grouped together with to provide the facilities also count)
are somewhere that isn’t a private home, holiday or other overnight accommodation (including any associated sporting facilities)
don’t involve the use of a mechanically propelled vehicle (including road vehicles, boats and aircraft).

You do have to report how much sporting or recreational facilities are worth to each employee if they are a part of a salary sacrifice arrangement.

If the facilities you provide aren’t exempt, you’ll need to:

report the cost on form P11D for each employee using the facilities
pay Class 1A National Insurance on the value of the benefit - this is normally the cost to you of providing the facilities, but contact HMRC if there isn’t a simple way of working this out

If the value of the benefit is less than the amount of salary given up, report the salary amount instead.

These rules don’t apply to arrangements made before 6 April 2017 - check when the rules will change.

The following guides contain more detailed information: