Cost of driving for self-employed workers
For those who drive as part of their jobs, such as self employed taxi drivers, Uber drivers and delivery drivers, then the increasing cost of buying and running a car is even more significant.
When your car is being used for long hours each day, then it’s more likely to need repairs and ultimately will need to be replaced more frequently and you’ll obviously spend more money on fuel too.
However, if you’re self-employed, you can still claim back expenses. For example, you can claim back costs such as your car insurance, repairs and servicing, fuel, parking, and more.
However you cannot claim back any expenses on driving that is not related to the business, any time spent driving from home to work, or any fines that you pick up while working.
Visit GOV.UK for more information on claiming back vehicle expenses when you’re self-employed.
Methodology
2022 vehicle prices were sourced from each manufacturer’s website and refer to the list price as of May 23 2022.
2021 vehicle prices were sourced from each manufacturer’s website and refer to the list price as of April 12 2021.
2012 and 2019 prices were sourced using the Wayback Machine by the Internet Archive, which shows archived versions of websites.
This allowed us to ‘go back’ to these years and find the list prices of those same vehicles. For each vehicle, we analysed the cheapest available model. Note that while prices may have changed throughout 2011, we took the prices from as close to May 23 2011 as possible.
Unfortunately, archived versions of sites for some brands such as Land Rover and Mini were unavailable, so these had to be omitted.
Median salary figures were sourced from the Office for National Statistics Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings.
Fuel costs were sourced from the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy’s monthly and annual prices of road fuels and petroleum products, taking the prices of premium unleaded and DERV for April 2012 and April 2022.
Road tax costs were sourced from GOV.UK’s vehicle tax rates (using Wayback Machine to source the 2012 rates).
Because the bands used to calculate the rates differ between the two years, we chose a number of specific emissions levels and compared the rates between 2012 and 2021 for each.
