HMRC Mileage Log Template: Simple Format for Claim-Ready Records

A mileage log template for UK claims needs to optimise for one thing: evidence quality. If you cannot explain each business journey to a stranger six months from now, the template is not doing its job.

HMRC does not mandate a specific format. You can use a spreadsheet, a notebook, or an app. What matters is that your records are consistent, complete, and easy to retrieve. This guide covers the fields to include, shows a worked example with different journey types, and flags the mistakes that most commonly trigger problems.

Download the template

• UK mileage log template as Excel (XLSX) — a journey log with a category dropdown and a summary that applies the AMAP calculation (55p for the first 10,000 business miles, 25p after) automatically. Works in Google Sheets, LibreOffice, and Numbers.
• Printable monthly log sheet (PDF) — an A4 grid for a paper logbook, with all required fields.

Free, no sign-up, no email address. Both files carry the fields explained below. The XLSX keeps every journey on one Log sheet with a Summary sheet that prices them; the PDF is a single monthly sheet you print as many times as you need.

Required fields for a UK mileage log

At minimum, every entry needs:

Column	What to record
Date	The date of travel (not the date you entered it)
Start location	Where the journey began — enough detail to identify the place, and the postcode if you will claim on a P87
End location	Where the journey ended, with its postcode for the same reason
Business purpose	A specific reason for the trip
Miles	Distance for this journey
Vehicle	Which vehicle you used

Optional but recommended extras:

• Client or project reference
• Temporary workplace flag
• Passengers carried (relevant for the 5p per mile supplement)
• Reimbursement status (if your employer pays mileage)

Mileage log example: six entries, six journey types

Here is a template with six entries showing different journey types you might record across a typical working month:

Date	Start Location	End Location	Purpose	Miles	Vehicle
03/02/2026	Home, Bristol	Barker & Co, Bath	Quarterly accounts review meeting	14.2	Ford Focus
05/02/2026	Main office, Bristol	Davies Supplies, Chippenham	Collect materials for Henderson project	23.8	Ford Focus
10/02/2026	Home, Bristol	West of England Training Centre, Exeter	ACCA CPD workshop (full day)	82.4	Ford Focus
14/02/2026	Home, Bristol	Ashton Gate temp site, Bristol	Weekly inspection at temporary workplace	4.6	Ford Focus
19/02/2026	Home, Bristol	Marshall Ltd, Swindon → Reeves & Co, Marlborough	Portfolio review at Marshall; contract signing at Reeves	98.3	Ford Focus
19/02/2026	Reeves & Co, Marlborough	Home, Bristol	Return from final client visit	47.1	Ford Focus

A few things to notice in this example:

• Client visit (row 1): Specific client name and meeting purpose — not just “meeting.”
• Supplier pickup (row 2): Shows a business reason for the trip, with the project referenced.
• Training course (row 3): Training at a venue away from your normal workplace qualifies as business travel. Include the course name or type.
• Temporary workplace (row 4): If you are working at a site for a limited period, that journey is business travel — flag it as a temporary workplace.
• Multiple stops (row 5): When a journey has several business stops, list the route and break out the purpose for each stop. If there were personal stops in the chain (petrol station is fine; gym is not), split the entry so personal miles are excluded.
• Return journey (row 6): Record the return leg as a separate entry. It is still business travel if the outbound leg was.

“Mileage logbook” means two different things in the UK

Search for a mileage logbook in the UK and you get two unrelated documents, which is worth untangling before you start keeping one.

The V5C is the vehicle registration certificate. DVLA issues it, it records who the registered keeper of a vehicle is, and it is the document people mean when they say “the logbook is in the glovebox”. It plays no part in a mileage claim. You never write journeys in it, HMRC never asks for it to support mileage relief, and losing it is a DVLA problem rather than a tax one.

A mileage logbook is your own running record of business journeys. Nobody issues it to you. It can be a notebook, the spreadsheet on this page, or an app, and its only job is to prove that the miles you claimed were business miles.

If you are here for the second one, the fields in the table above are the starting point, and the claim section below adds the two HMRC is most specific about: the reason for every journey, and the postcodes it ran between. HMRC publishes no official logbook, mandates no format, and accepts any medium — the rules are about what the record contains and how long you keep it, not what it looks like.

Paper, spreadsheet or app

All three are acceptable. They fail differently, which is the useful way to choose between them.

A paper logbook kept in the car is the easiest to maintain in the moment and the hardest to maintain for five years. Entries get made at the destination while the journey is fresh, which is exactly when purpose notes are most accurate. Then the book lives in a vehicle that gets sold, valeted or broken into, and handwriting from February 2026 has to still be legible years later — until 2032 if you are self-employed, and for at least 22 months after the end of the tax year if you are an employee claiming on a P87. If you use paper, photograph each completed page at month end and file the images with your other records.

A spreadsheet does the arithmetic for you: the cumulative total and the AMAP split calculate themselves, and nothing depends on legible handwriting. Its failure mode is the gap. Journeys get entered in batches days or weeks later, by which point distances are remembered rather than measured.

An app closes the gap by recording the journey as it happens, so the distance is measured rather than remembered and the date cannot drift. Its failure mode is classification: automatic capture produces a list that still needs someone to mark which journeys were business and why, and an unreviewed list of GPS traces is not a mileage log.

Whichever you choose, the two failure modes to design against are the same: entries made long after the journey, and records that do not survive to the end of the retention period.

Workbook structure

Use one workbook per tax year, not per calendar year. The 10,000-mile AMAP threshold resets on 6 April, and from 2026-27 the tax-year boundary also separates 45p journeys from 55p ones — a January-to-December workbook cannot answer either question without being re-cut by hand.

Whatever you divide the journeys into, the workbook needs three figures:

• Business miles total for the year to date.
• Cumulative position against the 10,000-mile threshold, so you can see when the rate is about to drop.
• AMAP calculation on those miles: 55p for the first 10,000 annual miles, 25p after that.

The downloadable XLSX puts all journeys on one sheet and keeps those three figures on a separate Summary sheet. A tab per month works too, as long as the annual total spans every tab and the summary tab is not one of the tabs being summed.

How the spreadsheet does the AMAP arithmetic

The XLSX on this page has three sheets — Instructions, Log, and Summary — and the whole calculation lives in four formulas on the Summary sheet. They are worth understanding whether you use that file or build your own.

On the Log sheet, column E holds the category (Business, Commute or Personal) and column F holds the miles. The Summary sheet splits the miles by category:

=SUMIF(Log!E2:E500,"Business",Log!F2:F500)

Then it prices the business miles, with the rates sitting in their own input cells rather than baked into the formula:

=MIN(B8,10000)*B6 + MAX(B8-10000,0)*B7

B8 is the business-miles total, B6 the first-tier rate and B7 the rate above the threshold. The MIN/MAX pair applies 55p only to the first 10,000 miles and 25p to the excess without needing an IF, and it keeps working after you cross the threshold mid-year without the edit that a hand-split calculation needs at that point. Rates in cells rather than in the formula matter more than it looks: when the first tier moved from 45p to 55p in April 2026, a workbook built this way needed one cell changed.

Two things the formula cannot do for you. The 10,000-mile threshold is a single annual allowance per person across all the cars and vans you drive for work — not one allowance per vehicle — so splitting miles into per-vehicle columns and running this formula on each column would double the allowance. And motorcycle and bicycle miles do not use it at all: 24p for motorcycles and 20p for bicycles apply to every mile with no threshold, so they belong in a separate flat multiplication. The bicycle rate is an AMAP rate for employees — as the claim section below notes, there is no self-employed flat rate for bicycles.

What makes a log entry HMRC accepts

A strong log entry passes the “stranger test” — someone with no knowledge of your business could read it and understand what the journey was, why it was business-related, and where it went.

Five qualities of a good entry:

1. Specific destination. “Client office” is weak. “Harper Engineering, Unit 4, Swindon Business Park” is strong.
2. Clear purpose. “Work” tells HMRC nothing. “Final inspection of completed electrical installation” tells them everything.
3. Accurate mileage. Use your car’s odometer, a mapping tool, or GPS tracking. Rough estimates invite scrutiny.
4. Recorded promptly. Entries made on the day of travel (or within a few days) carry more weight than entries reconstructed weeks later.
5. Consistent format. Every entry follows the same structure. Gaps, format changes, or missing fields make the whole log look unreliable.

Common mistakes to avoid

Vague purpose descriptions

“Business,” “client,” and “meeting” are the three most common purpose entries — and they are all too vague. HMRC expects enough detail to confirm the journey was genuinely for business. Add who you visited, where, and why.

Mixing commuting with business travel

Travel to your permanent workplace is ordinary commuting and is not claimable. If you work from home three days a week and drive to a regular office the other two, those office trips are commuting — even if you also do business while you are there.

Temporary workplaces are different. If you are sent to a client site for a three-month project, travel to that site qualifies as business mileage. The GOV.UK guidance on travel expenses explains the distinction.

Not tracking cumulative annual miles

The AMAP threshold at 10,000 miles means your per-mile rate drops from 55p to 25p. If you do not track cumulative miles, you will either overclaim (applying 55p to everything) or underclaim (applying 25p too early). Both are problems — one triggers HMRC attention, the other costs you money.

Round-number entries

A log full of journeys that are exactly 10, 15, or 20 miles looks estimated rather than measured. Real journeys have irregular distances — 14.2 miles, 23.8 miles, 7.6 miles. If every entry is a round number, HMRC may question the accuracy of the entire log.

Year-end bulk entry

Filling in twelve months of journeys in January is the fastest way to produce a weak log. Distances are guessed, purposes are vague, and the entries lack the specificity that contemporaneous records have. Weekly updates take five minutes; annual reconstruction takes hours and produces worse results.

Forgetting return journeys

If you drive to a client and back, that is two journey entries, not one. Some people record the outbound trip but forget the return, losing half their claimable miles.

No vehicle column

If you use more than one vehicle for business — perhaps a car for long trips and a bicycle for local client visits — you need to record which vehicle you used for each journey. AMAP rates differ by vehicle type: 55p per mile for cars and vans, 24p for motorcycles, 20p for bicycles. Without a vehicle column, you cannot calculate your claim correctly at year-end.

Turning the log into a claim: which HMRC form

A log is evidence for a claim, and the claim goes in one of three places. Which one depends on how you are paid, not on how you drive.

Employed, and the employer pays less than AMAP. You can claim Mileage Allowance Relief on the shortfall. If the employer pays 25p a mile for the first 10,000 business miles, the relief is on the missing 30p — at 8,000 miles that is £2,400 of untaxed allowance you have not used, worth £480 to a basic-rate taxpayer and £960 at the 40% higher rate. Scottish taxpayers apply their own bands, so the higher-rate figure there is £1,008 at 42%.

Employed, not in Self Assessment. Claim through HMRC’s online employment-expenses service, or by post on form P87 — HMRC accepts postal claims on that form and nothing else. Either route, the evidence goes in with the claim, and HMRC is specific about what a mileage log has to show: the reason for every journey, the postcode it started from and the postcode it ended at, with a separate log for each employment you are claiming against. A total expenses claim above £2,500 for a tax year cannot go this way at all — it pushes you into Self Assessment for that year.

Self-employed, or already in Self Assessment. The claim goes on the return itself, in the self-employment or employment pages as applicable. Using the flat mileage rates is the simplified-expenses method, and it is closed to you for any vehicle you have already claimed capital allowances on or put through as a business expense. Once you use it for a vehicle you must keep using it for as long as that vehicle is in business use. It covers cars, goods vehicles and motorcycles — there is no self-employed flat rate for bicycles.

Two deadlines matter more than they look. You have four years from the end of a tax year to claim relief for it — the 2022/23 year closes on 5 April 2027. And the AMAP threshold runs per tax year, so a log that does not carry a running annual total cannot tell you which of your journeys were still at 45p.

If the employer pays more than AMAP, the excess is taxable. Your employer reports it on the P11D, under mileage allowance payments not taxed at source, and puts the same excess through payroll for Class 1 National Insurance. There is nothing for you to claim, and the log’s job here is to show which miles were business at all.

Record retention and your template

HMRC requires you to keep business records for at least five years after the 31 January Self Assessment filing deadline for the relevant tax year. For the 2025/26 tax year, that means retaining your mileage log until at least 31 January 2032.

Store your monthly exports (PDF summaries and CSV raw data) in a folder structure that you can access long-term. Cloud storage is convenient, but keep a local backup too — services change, accounts expire, and you do not want to lose five years of records because a subscription lapsed. The GOV.UK self-employed records page confirms the retention rules.

Template plus app workflow

A mileage tracking app and a template work well together:

1. Auto-capture journeys — the app records GPS data, distance, and times.
2. Weekly classification — spend five minutes categorising trips as business, commute, or personal. Add purpose notes.
3. Monthly export and archive — pull summary and raw data from the app into your monthly folder.
4. Template cross-check — reconcile the app’s figures against your template totals to catch any discrepancies.

This keeps your Self Assessment workflow clean and gives you two independent sources of evidence.

Related UK guides

• HMRC Mileage Rates 2026: 55p and 25p AMAP Rates Explained
• Mileage Claim HMRC: Self-Employed Workflow That Survives Review
• Mileage Allowance Relief: Claiming the Gap Your Employer Leaves
• Best Mileage Tracker App UK: Four Tools Compared
• HMRC Mileage Logbook Rules: Recordkeeping Checklist for 2026

Month-close checklist

Before closing each month:

• No uncategorised journeys remain.
• Purpose notes are specific for any edge-case trips.
• Monthly summary and raw export are saved to the archive folder.
• Cumulative annual business miles are updated.
• Threshold split is recalculated if you crossed 10,000 miles that month.

A practical mileage log template is one you maintain all year — not one you build from scratch in January.

MileTrack captures journeys automatically, lets you mark them business or private, and exports claim-ready reports with all the fields HMRC expects. See how the automatic mileage log app for HMRC works, or get it free on the App Store.

Tax note: educational content only, not tax advice.