The HGV overnight allowance: £34.90, £26.20, and who gets what

Ask three drivers what the overnight allowance is and you'll get three numbers. Two of them will be out of date and the third will be applying the right number to the wrong situation. Here it is properly.

The agreed rate: £34.90

There's an industry scale rate agreed between HMRC and the RHA for employed drivers spending the night away from home and base. The full amount is £34.90 a night, paid free of tax and NIC.

The sleeper cab rate: £26.20

Sleeping in the cab? The rate is 75% of the full amount, so £26.20. The logic is that the allowance then covers an evening meal, breakfast, washing and keeping the cab bedding in order, rather than a room.

The bit operators miss: approval

To pay these rates tax-free, the operator needs an approval notice from HMRC and a checking procedure showing drivers genuinely stayed away and genuinely spent money. Pay it casually without approval and a PAYE inspection can reclassify the lot as taxable pay. That conversation is expensive, and we've sat in on it.

Self-employed owner-drivers

The scale rate is an employment thing. If you're a self-employed owner-driver, you claim what you actually spent on the road: meals, washing, the lot, backed by receipts. Different mechanism, same principle, and it's one of the expenses most often missed off tax returns entirely.

Worth doing properly

A driver doing three nights out a week is looking at roughly £4,000 a year of allowance. Multiply by a small fleet and the numbers stop being small. This is exactly the sort of thing we set up correctly once so it just runs.