If you have claimed the £6-a-week working from home allowance every year since lockdown, that claim is now closed. From 6 April 2026, HMRC no longer lets employees deduct homeworking costs from their tax, whether you work from home by choice or because your contract demands it.
TL;DR: Employees lost the working from home tax relief on 6 April 2026, including the £6-a-week flat rate and the actual-cost route. Around 300,000 people claimed it. You can still backdate claims for tax years up to 2025/26 within the four-year limit. Employers can still reimburse up to £6 a week tax-free, and the self-employed keep their home-office deduction.
What Changed for Working From Home Tax Relief in 2026?
From 6 April 2026, employees can no longer claim tax relief on additional household costs from working at home. The change removes both the £6-a-week flat rate (£312 a year, claimed without receipts) and the option to claim actual extra costs with evidence (GOV.UK, 2025).
This applies even if your employer requires you to work from home. The old distinction between a personal choice and a contractual requirement no longer matters: the relief is gone for everyone who paid the cost themselves.
Around 300,000 employees claimed the relief, and HMRC estimates the removal will cost a basic-rate taxpayer about £62 a year and a higher-rate taxpayer about £124 (GOV.UK, 2025). In our experience, this allowance was one of the most common adjustments sitting quietly in a client's tax code, so plenty of people will see it disappear without realising why.
Why Did HMRC Scrap the Relief?
HMRC scrapped it because most of the claims were wrong. When the department reviewed claims for non-reimbursed homeworking expenses, over half were found to be ineligible (GOV.UK, 2025). The relief was widened during the pandemic, claims surged, and the eligibility rules were widely misunderstood.
The Treasury also expects to recover real money. The change is forecast to raise £10 million in 2026/27, £30 million in 2027/28, then £25 million a year after that (GOV.UK, 2025).
The policy intent is to shift responsibility from individual employee claims towards employer-managed reimbursement, which is easier for HMRC to police and harder to claim incorrectly.
Can You Still Claim for Past Tax Years?
Yes. The abolition is not retrospective, so you can still claim for eligible homeworking costs in tax years up to and including 2025/26. HMRC's standard four-year time limit applies, which means a 2025/26 claim stays open until 5 April 2030 (GOV.UK, 2026).
If you were genuinely required to work from home in earlier years and never claimed, it is worth a look before the window closes. The four-year rule reaches back to 2022/23 as things stand in mid-2026.
One question clients always ask is whether a backdated claim triggers extra scrutiny. It does not by itself, but the eligibility test still applies: you must have been required to work from home and have incurred genuine extra cost. Casual or hybrid arrangements where you chose to work from home rarely qualified, even before the change.
What Your Employer Can Still Pay Tax-Free
The employer route survives. Where there is a homeworking arrangement, an employer can reimburse an employee up to £6 a week (£26 a month) towards household costs free of Income Tax and National Insurance, with no need to keep receipts (GOV.UK, 2026).
Payments above that level are still possible, but they need to be supported by evidence of the actual additional cost, otherwise the excess becomes taxable pay.
What we see most often is employees assuming the £6 has simply vanished. It hasn't. The money now has to come through payroll as an employer payment rather than as a personal tax deduction, so the practical question is whether your employer is willing to set up that reimbursement.
Are the Self-Employed Affected?
No. If you run a business as a sole trader, your home-office deduction is unchanged. You can still use HMRC's simplified expenses flat rates: £10 a month for 25 to 50 hours of home working, £18 a month for 51 to 100 hours, and £26 a month for 101 hours or more (GOV.UK, 2026).
The flat rate does not cover phone or internet, so you claim the business proportion of those bills separately. You can also choose to work out actual costs instead, apportioning rent, council tax, heating and electricity by room and time. Whichever method you use, keep the figures in order, especially as Making Tax Digital approaches; our MTD record-keeping guide for sole traders covers what HMRC expects.
Simplified expenses are not available to limited companies, so a director extracting income through a company falls under the employer rules above, not the sole-trader flat rate.
What the Change Means for Company Directors
Directors sit on both sides of this. As an employee of your own company, you have lost the personal claim like everyone else. As the employer, you control the company's reimbursement policy.
That makes the fix straightforward for most owner-managers: put a homeworking arrangement in place and have the company reimburse up to £6 a week tax-free. It is a small saving, but it is one of the few that costs nothing to set up. If you are reviewing how you pay yourself overall, our guide to director salary versus dividends for 2026/27 covers the bigger extraction decisions, and the rules sit alongside the other employer obligations in our employment allowance guide.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can employees still claim the £6 a week working from home allowance?
No. From 6 April 2026 employees cannot claim any working from home tax relief directly from HMRC, including the £6-a-week flat rate. The only remaining route is a tax-free reimbursement paid by your employer.
I claimed it last year. Do I need to do anything?
If the relief was in your tax code, HMRC should remove it for 2026/27. Check your coding notice so you are not surprised by a small change in take-home pay. You do not need to repay anything for years up to and including 2025/26 if your claim was valid.
Does the change affect hybrid workers?
It removes the relief for everyone, including hybrid workers. In practice most hybrid arrangements never qualified anyway, because the test required you to be obliged to work from home rather than choosing to.
How do I get the tax-free £6 a week now?
Your employer pays it as a homeworking reimbursement through payroll, free of Income Tax and National Insurance, provided there is a genuine homeworking arrangement. Ask your employer to set this up; it is not something you claim yourself.
Are limited company directors treated as employees or self-employed?
As employees. A director draws on the employer reimbursement rules, not the sole-trader simplified expenses. The company can reimburse up to £6 a week tax-free where a homeworking arrangement exists.
Not sure whether to set up a homeworking reimbursement or how it fits with the rest of your payroll? Get in touch and we'll review how you and your team are paid, check your tax codes for 2026/27, and flag any past-year claims still worth making before the window closes.