SE32370 - Travel expenses: up to and including 1997/98 - travel to and from home where it is a place of work

Where an employee's home is itself a place of work, the cost of travel between there and other places of work may sometimes be deductible under both the old travel rules and the new travel rules, see SE32360. A detailed explanation of the circumstances in which you can accept that an employee’s home is a place of work is at SE32760.

Note though that the fact that an employee’s home is treated as a workplace for tax purposes is not enough, on its own, for the journey to another permanent workplace to qualify as “travelling in the performance of the duties” for the purpose of relief under Section 198. For most people, the place where they live is a matter of personal choice. So the expense of travelling from home to any other place is a consequence of that personal choice, not an objective requirement of their job. The case law discussed in the following pages demonstrates that the expenses of travelling from home to another workplace do not qualify for relief under Section 198 unless the location of the employee’s home is itself dictated by the requirements of the job.

Even where that condition is met, the cost of travel between the employee's home and another permanent workplace is only deductible during those times when the home is a place of work, see SE32170.