Home-to-practice mileage — when it actually counts

We covered the basics of mileage logging in Mileage for locum GPs. This one’s about the question that actually causes the confusion: does home-to-practice mileage count, or doesn’t it?

Why this one’s genuinely tricky

For an employee, commuting to a fixed workplace isn’t an allowable expense — that’s just getting to work. But locum GPs aren’t commuting to one job. You’re moving between multiple, often short-term engagements, which is a very different pattern. HMRC’s approach to this hinges on a concept called your “base of operations” — broadly, whether each practice you attend counts as a temporary workplace rather than a permanent one.

This is genuinely one of those areas where the answer is “it depends on your specific pattern,” not a blanket yes or no. That’s not a cop-out — it’s the actual rule, and it’s exactly why so many locums end up asking their accountant this same question in their first year.

What tends to matter

Broadly, the things that shape the answer include:

• Whether you have a regular base practice you work from most of the time, versus genuinely varied locations
• How long you work at any one location — a single day here and there reads differently to a months-long regular commitment at the same site
• Whether your working pattern looks more like “one job with a fixed base” or “multiple short-term engagements”

None of this is something to guess at. It’s worth raising directly with an accountant early — ideally before you’ve built months of assumptions into your records that turn out to be wrong.

Record everything anyway

Here’s the practical point regardless of how the “does it count” question resolves for you: log every trip as you make it. If it turns out to be allowable, you’ve got a clean record. If part of it isn’t, you (or your accountant) can filter it out later. What you can’t do is reconstruct six months of journeys from memory in January — so the safe move is always to capture the raw data and let the allowability question get sorted separately.

For each trip, that means:

• Date
• Start and end points (or just the practice name, if home is your constant)
• Miles driven
• What the session was

Parking and tolls are usually separate

Don’t fold parking and toll costs into your mileage figure — they’re typically claimed as their own line item, and if you’re using the HMRC simplified mileage rate, you generally don’t also claim fuel separately for those same miles. Keep receipts or card statements where you can.

Making it less effort

In LocumBook, mileage attaches directly to the session you’re logging, and a home address lets the app work out distances for you rather than you doing the maths by hand. It won’t tell you whether a given trip is allowable — that’s genuinely a “talk to your accountant” question — but it makes sure you’ve got a complete, dated record either way.

See Mileage and tax in the user manual for the app-specific steps.

This is a general overview, not personal tax advice — your working pattern is your own, and this is exactly the kind of question worth a proper conversation with an accountant.