HMRC Mileage Claim for a Tesla: Rates, Records and Worked Examples (2026/27)

If you drive your own Tesla for work, HMRC lets you claim 55p per mile for the first 10,000 business miles from 6 April 2026 (25p after that) under the AMAP scheme. If you drive a company Tesla, the Advisory Electric Rate applies instead — 7p per mile for home charging, 15p for public, revised quarterly. Either way, HMRC expects a per-journey log: date, miles, reason, start and end postcodes.

That one distinction — whose car is it? — decides everything about your claim, so let’s take it from the top.

How much can I claim per mile for a Tesla I own personally?

For a personally owned Tesla used for business journeys, you claim under the Mileage Allowance Payments scheme (AMAP). From 6 April 2026, the approved amount is 55p per mile for the first 10,000 business miles in the tax year, and 25p per mile above 10,000 miles. Electric cars are treated exactly like petrol and diesel cars here — there is no separate, lower EV rate. The official rates are published on GOV.UK’s mileage rules page.

One thing to get right if you’re catching up on past claims: the 55p rate only applies to journeys driven on or after 6 April 2026. Business miles driven before that date — including all of the 2025/26 tax year — use the previous 45p rate.

Worked example: 14,000 business miles in 2026/27

Say you drive your own Model 3 for client visits and rack up 14,000 business miles this tax year:

What happens next depends on your employer:

• Employer pays you the full approved amount — that £6,500 is tax-free. Nothing to claim, nothing to declare.
• Employer pays less (or nothing) — you can claim Mileage Allowance Relief on the shortfall. If your employer reimbursed 30p per mile (£4,200), the gap is £6,500 − £4,200 = £2,300, and you get tax relief on that amount — worth £460 to a basic-rate taxpayer or £920 at the higher rate.
• Employer pays more than the approved amount — the excess is taxable income.

The deduction step is not optional. HMRC’s guidance on tax relief for vehicles you use for work is explicit: you must subtract anything your employer has already paid you towards business mileage before claiming the difference.

This is not tax advice — confirm the treatment of your specific situation with HMRC guidance or an accountant.

What are the HMRC rates for a company Tesla?

If the Tesla is a company car, AMAP does not apply. Instead, HMRC publishes an Advisory Electric Rate (AER) that employers can use to reimburse the electricity cost of business miles — or that you use to repay private mileage — without creating a taxable benefit.

Since 1 September 2025 the AER has been split by where you charge, and from 1 June 2026 the rates are:

Two caveats that trip people up:

• The rates change quarterly. HMRC revises advisory fuel rates every three months, so always check the current advisory fuel rates on GOV.UK before running a claim or setting a reimbursement policy.
• AER is for company EVs only. If you own the car personally, you’re back in AMAP territory at 55p/25p — a far better deal, because AMAP compensates you for the whole cost of running the car, not just the electricity.

The home/public split means your records now need to show not just how far you drove, but where the electricity came from. A driver who does 1,000 business miles in a quarter, 70% on home charging and 30% on public rapid charging, can be reimbursed 700 × 7p + 300 × 15p = £94 tax-free — but only if the split is documented, not guessed.

This is not tax advice — check the current quarterly rates and your employer’s policy before claiming.

What records does HMRC expect for a mileage claim?

This is where most claims fall apart — not on the rate, but on the evidence. Per HMRC’s guidance on vehicles you use for work, you must keep records of:

• The date of every business journey
• The mileage driven on that journey
• The reason for the journey (client meeting, site visit, delivery — “business” alone is not a reason)
• The start and end postcodes of the journey
• What your employer reimbursed you, so it can be deducted from your claim

A few practical consequences of that list:

• Per-journey, not per-month. A note saying “roughly 900 business miles in May” satisfies none of the requirements. Each trip needs its own line.
• Contemporaneous beats reconstructed. A log built from memory in January, the night before the Self Assessment deadline, looks like exactly what it is. Records kept as you drive are dramatically more credible if HMRC ever asks questions.
• Commuting doesn’t count. Ordinary home-to-work travel is not business mileage, so your log needs to distinguish business trips from commute and private trips — not just record everything as one bucket.
• The odometer is your anchor. If the miles in your log don’t reconcile with the miles the car actually accumulated, the whole log is suspect. A log whose trip totals sum exactly to the odometer is very hard to argue with.

Keep the records for the year, total the business miles, apply the rates, deduct employer reimbursements, and claim the balance through HMRC — via their online relief service or your Self Assessment return, depending on your situation.

This is not tax advice — HMRC’s record-keeping requirements are the taxpayer’s responsibility to meet.

How do I keep an HMRC-ready log without doing it manually?

Everything above is doable with a notebook or a spreadsheet — people have done it for decades. The failure mode is human: you skip logging one busy week, then a month, and by Q3 you’re reconstructing journeys from calendar entries and guesswork, which is precisely the kind of log HMRC discounts. (For a deeper look at what a defensible log looks like trip by trip, see our Tesla mileage log guide.)

This is the problem VoltLogger was built for.

How VoltLogger does this automatically

VoltLogger is a web app (PWA) that connects once to your Tesla through the official Tesla Fleet API — OAuth sign-in, no password stored, revocable from your Tesla account whenever you like. No OBD dongle, no wiring, no hardware in the car. From then on:

• Every trip is logged automatically with odometer start and end readings taken from the car itself, plus start and destination addresses and a route indication. Because trips are anchored to the real odometer, your annual totals always reconcile with the actual mileage — the reconciliation an inspector reaches for first.
• Every trip gets a classification — business, commute or private — with one tap, or automatically via from→to rules (office → regular client = business, every time). That’s your “reason for the journey” and your commute exclusion handled at the moment of driving, not months later.
• Nothing goes missing. If a data poll is missed, the odometer delta reconstructs the gap, so the year stays complete and closed — no phantom untracked miles that break the reconciliation.
• Every charging session is logged too: kWh from the car’s own meter, classified as home, work, public or DC via geofences, and priced against your real electricity tariff. For a company Tesla on the split AER, that’s your documented home-vs-public evidence per journey period; for a personal Tesla, it tells you your true cost per mile next to the 55p you claim. There’s more on the charging side in our EV home charging reimbursement guide.
• Audit-ready exports: month, quarter and year summaries as CSV and PDF, with edit history preserved. Locked or exported rows are never silently recalculated, so the report you filed stays the report you filed.

VoltLogger doesn’t make your claim compliant by magic — the requirements remain yours to meet — but it removes the reason claims usually fail: the log that was never kept.

What does it cost, and what’s the catch?

VoltLogger costs EUR 5 per month or EUR 29 per year — a rounding error against the tax relief on even a modest year of business mileage (the worked example above was worth £460–£920). It’s free to try with no credit card, you can cancel anytime, and your data is hosted in the EU under GDPR.

One honest note: the app interface is currently in Dutch (VoltLogger launched in the Netherlands first), with the English version in progress. The trip logic, odometer anchoring and exports work identically in the UK today.

If you drive a Tesla for work and you’re still logging miles by hand — or worse, not logging them at all — an automatic Tesla mileage tracker pays for itself with the first claim it rescues.

Quick recap

• Own Tesla, business miles: AMAP — 55p per mile for the first 10,000 miles from 6 April 2026, 25p thereafter; 45p applies to pre-April-2026 journeys.
• Company Tesla: AER — 7p per mile home charging, 15p public, from 1 June 2026; revised quarterly, so check before every claim.
• Records: date, miles, reason, start and end postcodes for every journey — and deduct whatever your employer reimbursed.
• The winning habit: log contemporaneously, anchored to the odometer. Or let the car do it.

This is not tax advice. Rates and rules are those published by HMRC as of July 2026; verify current figures on GOV.UK or with your accountant before filing.