Employed workers can claim working from home allowance for new tax year

Employed workers who were forced to work from home because of the pandemic can now claim the government’s working from home allowance for the 2021/22 tax year

This gives workers a £6 per week allowance to cover home working costs and can be applied for at any time after the new tax year started.

HMRC has confirmed that employed workers can now claim the working from home allowance for the new tax year (2021/22), where they have worked at home for just one day because of the coronavirus restrictions.

The £6 per week working from home allowance is worth £62 for basic rate (20%) taxpayers; £125 for higher rate (40%) taxpayers and £140 for additional rate (45%) tax payers for the 2021/22 tax year.

The rules last year on who is eligible to claim the working from home allowance were relaxed last year. Before the coronavirus pandemic, a worker could only claim the allowance in limited circumstances where their employer required them to work at home and for that specific period only.

People could claim the working from home allowance for the entire 2020/21 tax year if they had worked at home for just one day because of the coronavirus restrictions preventing them from attending their place of work.

At the start of the new tax year on 6 April, HMRC confirmed the same relaxed rule will apply for the 2021/22 tax year.

HMRC’s microservice site was already up and running so it made sense to extend the system for this tax year. HMRC is also likely to be wary of people making standalone claims for working at home this tax year, and the additional time and cost it would take to process these, so it makes sense from their perspective to simply let the system run for another year.

Those that haven’t claimed their allowance for the 2020/21 tax year can do this at the same time as claiming the current tax year here