Claim back tax for working at home

If you are a person who has been required to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, you are likely to be eligible to claim back tax. Read more below.

What can I claim and how?

As a person who has been required to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, you are likely to be eligible to claim back tax paid on your earnings to offset the extra energy expenditure associated with working at home.  This allowance is claimable only for weeks where you were required to work from home, not for weeks during which you were furloughed.

This can be done using an online through your Government Gateway account.

You can make your claim here. You’ll be asked for your employer’s name and PAYE reference and your job title.

For postal P87s, you’ll also need your national insurance number. The key section to fill in is headed ‘Using your home as an office’.

In the online form, there are two boxes:

‘Amount paid to you by your employer’. If your employer has not paid expenses due solely to working at home directly to you, you should not complete this section.

‘Amount paid by you’.  Provided you have had increased costs associated with working at home (increased energy usage for example), just put a total amount that is equivalent to £6 per week for the period you’ve been working from home.  You will not need to keep records or show receipts or bills.

You claim retrospectively on expenses you have already incurred in each tax year.  This means that it might be best to make a claim now for any time you’d spend working from home before 5 April 2020, then when you stop regularly working from home, make the claim for tax year 2020/21.

Your tax code will likely be adjusted so you pay less tax over the year, as opposed to you getting a direct refund.

Once you have submitted the claim, if you do it online you may hear back within a couple of weeks.  However due to very large numbers of people submitting such claims in the current climate, it may take longer.
 

What if I don’t have a Government Gateway Account?

You can use the paper P87 form and post it to HMRC, or you can create a Government Gateway Account using by following this link.