SE32366 - Travel expenses: up to and including 1997/98 - travelling appointments

An employee who holds a travelling appointment could deduct all of their business travelling expenses under the old travel rules, even where the journey starts from home. This has not changed under the new travel rules, see SE32020.

There is little guidance in case law about what constitutes a travelling appointment but a commercial traveller can be said to be typical. A commercial traveller is travelling on his or her work, as distinct from travelling to it, from the moment of leaving home. Another example is a service engineer who moves about from place to place during the day carrying out repairs to domestic appliances at clients' premises. Such employees are often described as itinerant.

If an employee has to report to and work at a particular office at the start and end of the day, travel between there and home was not deductible. However, if the calls at that office are fortuitous or incidental, the journeys to and from home were deductible.

Whether an employee is truly itinerant, or merely has two or more fixed places of work, is essentially a question of fact. There are bound to be marginal cases.

Many jobs require 'mobility', in the sense that an employee will have to work at a number of different places from week to week or month to month. But this does not mean that the duties themselves inherently involve travelling, merely that the employee will not always incur the same cost in getting to (or staying near) work. Clearly the frequency with which such changes take place is of major importance. There will be a strong presumption that anyone required to go to a number of different sites each day on an irregular basis will have a travelling appointment. Other factors, however, also need to be taken into account, such as the nature of the work itself and whether, for pay purposes, the employee is treated as starting work only on reaching each site.

It is important, therefore, when an employee considers that he or she has a travelling appointment, to obtain as much information as possible about work patterns. If necessary, ask for a record covering a typical period of weeks or months.