Free Mileage Tracker Apps UK: What Free Actually Covers

Search for a free mileage tracker and you will find a long list of apps that are, technically, free. The word does a lot of work in that sentence. Almost every tracker in this market is free to install and free to record with. The limits sit somewhere further down the workflow — usually at the exact point where you need the data.

This guide covers the four ways free tiers get limited, how to detect each one inside a week, and how to decide whether a free plan is genuinely enough for the volume of business journeys you actually drive.

The economics behind the free tier

Mileage tracking has a real running cost. Background location detection consumes battery and support time, and storing a year of journey history for every user costs money. No app absorbs that indefinitely without a plan to convert some users.

That is not a criticism — it is a design constraint worth understanding, because it tells you where the limit will be. An app that gives away unlimited automatic detection has to charge somewhere else, and the somewhere else is usually the export.

Knowing that, the question is not “is it free?” but “what is free, and what happens in January?”

The four limits that matter

1. Journey caps

The most common restriction: automatic detection stops after a set number of journeys per month. Once you hit the cap, journeys are either dropped entirely or downgraded to manual entry.

A cap sounds generous until you count properly. A field engineer visiting three sites a day generates six journeys daily — out and back — which is roughly 120 journeys in a working month. A letting agent doing viewings can double that. Count your actual round trips for one representative week and multiply by four before you decide whether a cap is comfortable.

The failure mode is quiet. You do not get an invoice; you get a gap in your log, and you discover it when you build the annual figure for your return.

2. Export paywalls

The second restriction is the sharpest one: free to track, paid to download. Your journeys are recorded, visible in the app, and locked behind an upgrade the moment you ask for a CSV, XLSX, or PDF.

This is the limit most worth testing early, because it is invisible until you try. It also has the worst timing characteristics — you find out in January, with a full tax year of data already committed to that app, which is precisely when your leverage is lowest.

3. History retention

Some free tiers keep only the last 30, 90, or 180 days of journeys. That is shorter than a tax year, and considerably shorter than the retention HMRC expects.

GOV.UK guidance on record keeping asks self-employed people to keep business records for at least five years after the 31 January submission deadline for that tax year. A rolling 90-day window cannot satisfy that on its own, no matter how good the tracking is.

4. Classification and correction tools

The fourth restriction is subtler and easier to underestimate. Detection is the easy half of mileage tracking; classification is the half that takes your time — and under HMRC rules the classification is the part that decides whether a journey is claimable at all.

Ordinary commuting to a permanent workplace is not business travel. If the free tier gives you raw detected journeys but withholds bulk editing, saved places, or repeat-route learning, you are left separating commute from business by hand across a few hundred journeys.

That is not a hard limit — you can do it — but it converts a background task into a monthly chore, and chores are the reason mileage logs get abandoned in June.

What a free plan has to do to be enough

Reduced to essentials, a free mileage tracker is sufficient if it can produce, without payment:

Requirement	Why it matters
Every business journey for the full tax year	Partial years cannot be reconstructed accurately after the fact
Date, from, to, purpose, and distance per journey	These are the fields an HMRC-ready record is expected to carry
Business, commute, and private kept apart	Ordinary commuting is not claimable and must not sit in the total
An export in CSV or XLSX	Machine-readable data survives an app switch; screenshots do not
Cumulative annual mileage	The AMAP rate drops from 45p to 25p after 10,000 business miles
Records retained past the five-year mark	Retention needs to outlast the return, not the subscription

If a free tier delivers all six for your journey volume, it is genuinely free for your purposes. If it delivers five, the missing one is where you will eventually pay — in money or in reconstruction work.

A one-week test that surfaces the limits

You do not need a month to find the ceiling. Run this in your first week, while switching costs are still zero:

1. Drive normally for five working days. Do not adjust your routine to help the app.
2. Count detected versus actual journeys. Missing round trips or merged journeys tell you more about the app than any feature list.
3. Classify everything, including the commute. Note how long it takes. Multiply by fifty.
4. Export on day five. This is the decisive step. If an upgrade prompt appears, you have found the real price, and you have found it while you have only five days of data to lose.
5. Open the export in a spreadsheet. Check that date, from, to, distance, and purpose are all present as separate columns rather than one merged text blob.
6. Check the retention policy in writing. Settings or the store listing, not the marketing page.

A tracker that passes all six is worth committing a tax year to. One that fails step four is not free; it is deferred payment with your data as collateral.

Free versus paid: what the money actually buys

At the AMAP rate of 45p per mile, 5,000 business miles is a £2,250 claim. Against that number, most paid mileage apps cost a small fraction of the claim they document — and for the self-employed the subscription is itself an allowable expense.

That arithmetic makes “free” the wrong optimisation target for high-mileage drivers. The right target is record quality, because a claim you cannot evidence is worth nothing regardless of what you paid to track it.

For low-mileage drivers the arithmetic reverses. If you drive 600 business miles a year, the claim is £270, and a paid subscription is a meaningful fraction of it. A free tier that exports cleanly is the correct choice.

The crossover point is roughly where your annual journey count exceeds what a free tier will detect, or where the time you spend classifying by hand exceeds the cost of the paid plan. Both are worth calculating with your own numbers rather than assuming.

Where MileTrack sits

MileTrack is free to use, and that includes the export. Journeys are detected automatically, classified as business, commute, or private, and exported as PDF, CSV, or XLSX with the fields an HMRC claim expects — no upgrade prompt between you and your own data. Cumulative business mileage is tracked against the 10,000-mile AMAP threshold rather than left for you to total by hand.

Journey history stays on your device by default rather than on a server, which also means retention is not tied to a subscription state. There is no account to create and no card to enter.

That is the current model, and it is the one to check against the six requirements above rather than take on trust. Run the one-week test.

Related guides

• Best Mileage Tracker App UK 2026: 4 Apps Compared for HMRC
• HMRC Mileage Rates 2026: 45p and 25p AMAP Rates Explained
• HMRC Mileage Logbook Rules: Recordkeeping Checklist for 2026

Tax note: educational content only, not tax advice. App pricing and plan limits change frequently — verify current terms before relying on them.