Meal Expenses and Business Travel: What Sole Traders and Company Directors Can Actually Claim

Food and drink is one of the most misunderstood areas of business expenses. The rules are not the same for everyone, and the difference between what a limited company director can claim and what a sole trader can claim is significant. Getting it wrong — either by overclaiming or by missing genuine relief you are entitled to — is a common and avoidable mistake.

This guide sets out the rules in plain English for both structures. Rates and guidance are accurate as at 13 April 2026.

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The Starting Point: Why Meal Expenses Are Complicated

Food is treated differently from most other business expenses because of a legal principle HMRC calls the "duality of purpose" test. To be deductible as a business expense, a cost must be incurred "wholly and exclusively" for business purposes. With meals, there is always a personal purpose too — you eat to live, regardless of whether you are working. That dual purpose is the reason why simply being hungry during a workday does not make your lunch tax-deductible.

This principle comes from Caillebotte v Quinn [1975], where the court confirmed that even when a self-employed builder was forced to buy more expensive meals because he worked away from home, the cost was still not wholly and exclusively for business. The extra inconvenience did not create a new, purely commercial purpose.

Understanding this principle explains most of the rules below — and why the rules are stricter than many people expect.

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If You Are a Sole Trader

The General Rule: You Cannot Claim Everyday Meals

As a sole trader, everyday meal costs — lunch during a normal working day, food at your desk, coffee while you work — are not deductible business expenses. This applies even if you work long hours, even if you are far from home, and even if eating out is more expensive because of where your work takes you.

HMRC's Business Income Manual (BIM37920) confirms this clearly: "A self-employed taxpayer, like any other taxpayer, must eat to live." The fact that you are working does not transform a personal necessity into a business expense.

When Sole Traders Can Claim

There are two situations where sole traders can deduct meal costs:

1. Itinerant trades — where travelling is the nature of the job

If your business is inherently mobile — you travel between different client sites or locations as the core of what you do, rather than working from a fixed base with occasional travel — HMRC accepts that reasonable subsistence costs during those journeys may be deductible.

A commercial traveller, a mobile tradesperson, or a self-employed driver who moves between locations as a matter of course may fall into this category. The key test is whether the travel is a fundamental part of how the business operates, not an occasional feature of it. If you work from a fixed office or workshop most of the time and travel occasionally, you do not meet this test.

2. Overnight business travel

When a business trip genuinely requires you to stay overnight away from home — not as a preference, but because of the nature and distance of the trip — the reasonable cost of accommodation and meals taken as part of that stay can be deducted as a business expense. This applies whether meals are billed separately or included in your hotel bill.

The key word is reasonable. HMRC does not set a fixed figure for what "reasonable" means for sole traders, but if your subsistence claims look disproportionate relative to the nature of your business travel, they will attract scrutiny. Keep receipts and records for everything you claim.

What Sole Traders Cannot Claim

To be clear about the boundaries:

• Lunch during a normal working day at or near your regular place of work
• Coffee or snacks while working from home or a fixed base
• Meals where the cost has simply been inflated by location (a more expensive area does not make the meal deductible)
• Meals claimed as "business entertaining" when they are not — this is a separate category with its own rules
• Any cost for food or drink consumed for personal purposes, even on a day with a business element

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If You Are a Limited Company Director

As a director of a limited company, you are an employee of that company — even if you own it entirely. This changes the rules significantly, and works in your favour.

HMRC has a system called benchmark scale rates, which allows employers to reimburse employees for meal costs during qualifying business travel — without receipts, without tax, and without National Insurance. Since you are both the employer and the employee, your company can use this system to reimburse you.

The Benchmark Scale Rates (Current Rates — Unchanged Since April 2016)

There is also a supplementary rule: if a journey lasts 5 or more hours, or 10 or more hours, and it extends beyond 8pm, an additional £10 can be paid on top of the relevant rate. A 6-hour journey that ends at 9pm, for example, could attract £5 + £10 = £15.

These rates were last updated on 9 April 2026 — no changes were made. They have been in place since April 2016, under the Income Tax (Approved Expenses) Regulations 2015, and are set out in HMRC's Employment Income Manual at EIM30240.

What "Tax-Free" Actually Means Here

If your company reimburses you at or below these rates, and the journey meets the qualifying conditions set out below:

• You pay no income tax on the reimbursement
• There is no National Insurance — neither employee nor employer contributions
• The company deducts the cost as a business expense, reducing corporation tax

Done correctly, this is one of the simplest legitimate ways to extract value from your company without a tax cost.

The Three Qualifying Conditions

The payment only qualifies for this treatment if all three of the following apply to each journey:

1. The travel must be a qualifying business journey.

The journey must be undertaken in the performance of your duties, or to reach a temporary workplace. It cannot be "substantially ordinary commuting." This means your regular journey from home to your company's office does not qualify — even if you own the company. Travel to client sites, meetings, temporary project locations, or other places where you are performing business duties does qualify.

2. You must be away long enough.

You must be absent from your normal workplace or home for a continuous period exceeding the relevant threshold — more than 5 hours for the £5 rate, more than 10 hours for the £10 rate, more than 15 hours (ending after 8pm) for the £25 rate.

This is total absence time, not just working hours. If you leave at 7am, travel to a client for a full day, and return home at 6pm, that is 11 hours away — qualifying for the £10 rate.

3. You must have actually incurred a cost.

The benchmark rate system removes the need to collect and verify receipts. But you must have genuinely bought food and drink during the journey. If you skipped lunch or brought your own food from home, the rate cannot be applied. The purpose of the system is to reimburse real costs without administrative burden — not to create a payment where no cost exists.

All three conditions must be satisfied for each journey. Satisfying two of the three is not sufficient.

What Happens if You Pay More Than the Benchmark Rates

If your company reimburses you above the benchmark rates — for example, paying £20 for a single meal on a 5-hour qualifying journey — the excess (£15 in that example) is treated as additional earnings. It becomes subject to income tax and Class 1 National Insurance for you personally, and the company pays employer's National Insurance on the excess too.

There is an alternative if your real meal costs consistently exceed the benchmark rates: you can agree a bespoke scale rate with HMRC, based on actual sampled costs. This requires an application, a sampling exercise, and ongoing record-keeping. For most sole directors of small companies, the standard rates cover typical costs adequately, and a bespoke agreement is not necessary.

Your Obligations as Employer (Post-April 2019)

From 6 April 2019, HMRC removed the requirement for employers to check receipts when using benchmark scale rates. The law was changed under section 289A ITEPA 2003, and the administrative obligation is now lighter.

You are still required to have a system in place to verify that qualifying travel actually took place. But this does not mean collecting a receipt for every sandwich. For a director managing their own company, keeping a simple travel log — dates, destinations, purpose of travel, departure and return times — is sufficient. Calendar entries, email correspondence with clients, and meeting records all support this.

The principle is that neither you (as employer) nor anyone else "knows or suspects, or could reasonably be expected to know or suspect" that travel did not take place. This is a common-sense standard, not an onerous documentation requirement.

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What Benchmark Scale Rates Do Not Cover

It is worth being clear about the limits of the benchmark rate system:

Overnight stays — if you stay away overnight, the benchmark meal rates still apply to meals, but overnight accommodation and related costs are a separate matter covered by different HMRC rules.

Staying with friends or family — HMRC does not accept any scale rate where an employee stays with friends or relatives rather than in paid accommodation.

Working Rule Agreement employees — construction and certain other industries have their own industry-negotiated rates. Employees covered by those agreements use different provisions.

Personal entertaining — the benchmark scale rate system is for subsistence costs during travel. It does not cover business entertaining (taking a client to dinner), which has its own separate and more restrictive rules.

The daily commute — as noted above, travel between home and your regular workplace does not qualify, regardless of distance.

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Side-by-Side Comparison

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Common Mistakes to Avoid

Sole traders claiming everyday lunch. Day-to-day meal costs are not deductible, no matter how hard you work or how far from home you happen to be. Only itinerant trades and overnight travel create deductibility.

Directors not using the benchmark rate system at all. Many directors either miss this entirely or waste time collecting and processing meal receipts when the benchmark rate approach is cleaner and simpler. If you are making regular qualifying business trips, set up a simple system to record them and pay yourself at the appropriate rate.

Treating the daily commute as a qualifying journey. This applies to both structures. Home to your regular office or studio is not a business journey under HMRC rules, regardless of how far it is or that you own the business.

Directors paying above benchmark rates without HMRC approval. The excess is taxable. If your real costs regularly exceed the rates, consider whether a bespoke scale rate agreement is worth pursuing — but do not simply absorb the excess into untaxed reimbursements.

Not keeping travel records. For directors using benchmark rates, you do not need meal receipts but you do need to demonstrate the journey happened. A simple log or calendar record is all that is needed — but it needs to exist.

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Need Help?

Getting subsistence and travel expenses right is worth the effort — both to avoid overclaiming (which creates risk) and to ensure you are not leaving legitimate deductions on the table. For limited company directors in particular, the benchmark scale rate system is simple and genuinely valuable once it is set up correctly.

At Companies999, we work through travel and subsistence arrangements as part of our standard service for both sole traders and limited company directors. If you want to make sure you are claiming correctly, or want help setting up a simple, compliant expense system, we are happy to help.

Find out more about our accountancy services, or get in touch for a free consultation.

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This article draws on HMRC's Employment Income Manual (EIM30240, EIM05231), Business Income Manual (BIM37670, BIM37920), and the Income Tax (Approved Expenses) Regulations 2015. Rates confirmed current as at 13 April 2026. This article does not constitute tax advice in relation to your particular circumstances.