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What can I actually claim? A guide for small limited company owners

Matt Parrett, Chartered Tax Adviser · eTax AI · July 2026 · 8 min read

The question I get asked more than any other, by a long way, is simply: what can I claim?

Most people already know the obvious answers. Printing, stationery, phone bills, advertising, stock, materials, protective clothing — if you bought it for the business, you can almost certainly claim it. Be sensible, keep the receipt, and if you're not sure, ask.

What interests me more is the list people never think of. Every time I sat down with a new company owner, we'd find several thousand pounds of perfectly legitimate claims they had no idea existed. Here are the ones that come up again and again.

Putting your husband or wife on the payroll

If your spouse doesn't work, or works part-time and earns well under the personal allowance, there is often a genuine job for them in your business. Answering the phone. Doing the books. Acting as company secretary. Writing up the paperwork.

Pay them for it. The wage is a cost in the company, which reduces your corporation tax, and if their total income stays under £12,570 they pay no income tax on it.

One important change since I first recorded this. Employer's National Insurance is now charged at 15% on anything above £5,000 a year. So a £12,570 salary now carries around £1,135 of employer's NI on top — it isn't the free win it used to be.

The saving grace is the Employment Allowance, which is £10,500 a year and wipes out that bill for most small companies. But there's a catch that catches people out: a company with a single director and no other staff cannot claim it. Putting your spouse on the payroll above £5,000 is usually what makes the company eligible in the first place.

Two rules you must not ignore. The work has to be real, and the money has to actually be paid into their bank account. A salary on paper for a job nobody does is the one HMRC will unpick.

Giving your spouse shares in the company

If you're taking all the profit out yourself, you may be pushing into higher-rate tax while your spouse's allowances go unused. Splitting the income between you evens that out. That is the whole point of tax planning — use both sets of allowances rather than one.

The bit that matters, and that people get wrong: the shares have to be proper ordinary shares carrying full rights. Votes, a share of the capital if the company is ever wound up, and a right to the whole of the dividend. And the gift has to be outright, with no strings.

If you instead issue a special class of share that only ever gets dividends — no votes, no stake in the company — HMRC can treat the dividends as still being yours and tax you on them. That's a well-established position and it is not worth testing.

There is also a non-tax point I always made sure clients heard. Give your spouse shares and your spouse legally owns part of your business. If you separate, you no longer own all of it. Most people are comfortable with that. Some aren't. Decide with your eyes open.

Using your home as an office

You have two options.

The simple one: claim £6 a week. No paperwork, no records, no argument. It's also not very much money.

The better one, if you genuinely work from home: put a proper agreement in place where your company rents space in your house from you. I always drew up a licence to occupy for clients — a short legal document letting the company use, say, the third bedroom, on a non-exclusive basis. Non-exclusive matters, because a room used only for business can cause you a capital gains tax problem when you sell the house.

Work out the rent by looking at what a serviced office nearby would cost for similar space. Say that comes to £4,000 a year. The company pays you £4,000 and gets tax relief on it. You declare the £4,000 on your tax return — but you deduct a fair proportion of the running costs of your home against it: mortgage interest or rent, gas, electricity, insurance, repairs. That might bring the taxable amount down to £1,500.

The real beauty of it is this: it gets money out of your company without dividend tax and without National Insurance. Ring a local serviced office, get a price, keep the quote on file.

Selling your own kit into the company

When you start up, you almost always own things you then use in the business. Laptop, iPad, phone, desk, chair, filing cabinet, bookcase. If you're in a trade, your tools — and a decent tool kit can easily be worth three or four thousand pounds.

Make a list on day one and put a sensible second-hand value against each item. I'd bet most people reach two or three thousand pounds without trying.

You then sell those items to your own company at that value. The company gets tax relief on the cost, and it owes you the money — which you can draw out over time, tax-free, because it's repayment of what you're owed rather than income.

Do it at the start, while you can still remember what you own.

The money you spent before you started

You had the idea. You saw an accountant. You went to the bank. You drove around meeting people, made calls, bought a laptop, paid for a website domain.

All of that counts. You can go back up to seven years before you started trading and claim costs you'd have been able to claim if the business had already existed. They're treated as if you spent them on your first day of trading.

Most people simply don't ask, so it never gets claimed. Dig out the old receipts and bank statements.

Phone, landline and broadband

If the mobile contract is in the company's name, the company pays the whole bill, gets full tax relief, and there's no tax charge on you personally — even for your private calls. That's one phone per person, and it has to be the company's contract, not yours.

If the contract is in your own name, you can only claim the business proportion.

And don't forget your home landline and broadband. You're using that internet for work. If it's 70% business, claim 70%. People routinely leave this one on the table.

Mileage

If you use your own car for business, claim mileage rather than putting the car through the company.

The rate went up this year: 55p a mile for the first 10,000 business miles, then 25p after that. It was 45p for the previous fifteen years, so if you're working from an old spreadsheet, update it.

For most people this comfortably beats what the running costs actually are.

Company cars — and here I've changed my mind

I used to tell people to stay well away from company cars unless they were electric, and then add that electric cars weren't ready yet. That advice is now out of date and I'd rather say so plainly than leave it standing.

Electric company cars are currently the single best deal in this area. The taxable benefit on a fully electric car is 4% of the list price in 2026/27, against figures three to eight times higher for a petrol or diesel equivalent. It rises to 5% next year, 7% in 2028/29 and 9% in 2029/30 — so the advantage narrows over time, but it is still substantial.

If you were ever going to put a car through your company, an electric one is the way to do it. A petrol or diesel company car is still, for most small company owners, an expensive mistake.

Your pension

If you're paying into a personal pension out of your own pocket, stop, and pay it from the company instead.

Think about what happens the current way: the company earns the money, you take it out as a dividend, you pay dividend tax on it, and then you pay what's left into your pension. Pay it straight from the company and you skip that middle step entirely. The company gets tax relief on the contribution and no tax arises on you.

The annual limit is £60,000 for most people. It's one of the easiest wins on this whole list and it takes one phone call to your pension provider.

Meals

You can claim meals when you're genuinely travelling on business — out at a customer's site, away overnight, on a journey that isn't your normal commute. Buy a sandwich and a coffee on the way to a job, keep the receipt, claim it.

Meals near your normal place of work are a different matter — that's just lunch, and it isn't claimable. The test is whether the cost was caused by business travel.

Trivial benefits — the one almost nobody uses

This is my favourite small rule, because it's simple, it's completely legitimate, and hardly any company owner knows it exists.

Your company can give you a small gift, and provided it meets the conditions there's no tax on you, no National Insurance, and the company still gets relief on the cost.

The conditions are short:

• It has to cost £50 or less
• It can't be cash, or a voucher you can exchange for cash. A gift card is fine; a fifty pound note is not
• It can't be a reward for work you've done, or for hitting a target
• It can't be something you're entitled to under your contract

If you're a director of a small company — and by that HMRC means one with five or fewer shareholders, which covers almost every business reading this — there's an annual cap of £300. So six gifts of £50 across the year, and that's your lot. Your family and household share that same £300, so if the company gives your spouse something too, it counts against the same total.

One trap worth knowing: the £50 is a cliff edge, not an allowance. Spend £51 and the whole £51 becomes taxable, not just the pound over.

The easiest way to use it in practice is an Amazon voucher. It's a non-cash voucher, so it qualifies. You can buy it for exactly £50, which keeps you the right side of the limit without any guesswork. And it's genuinely useful, which not every corporate gift is. Six £50 Amazon vouchers across the year and you've taken the full £300 out of your company, tax-free.

A meal out, a bottle of something at Christmas, flowers or a birthday gift all work just as well. Whatever you choose, keep the receipt and jot down the date and what it was — that's the whole of the record keeping.

In short

Most business owners underclaim, not because they're being cautious, but because nobody ever told them what was available. Go through this list once, properly, at the start of your company's life. It's usually worth several thousand pounds — and it's worth it every year after that too.

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