Accountant for Haulage and Transport Companies: What the Rules Ask of You in 2026/27

If you run trucks in the United Kingdom, three tax obligations land on you at once and none of them waits for the accounts to be prepared. You have to run payroll for your drivers in real time, you have to charge and account for Value Added Tax (VAT) on your haulage supplies, and you have to decide how each vehicle you buy is written off against profit. Get those three right and the rest of the year is tidy. The figures below are 2026/27 unless a different date is attached.

Obligation one: driver payroll and the real cost of a wage

Every employed driver goes through Pay As You Earn (PAYE). You report each payment to HM Revenue and Customs on or before payday through a Full Payment Submission, and you pay over the tax and National Insurance monthly. Miss those filings and the penalty is monthly and scaled by headcount: £100 for one to nine employees, £200 for ten to 49, £300 for 50 to 249 and £400 for 250 or more.

The number that surprises operators is the loaded cost of the wage. Employer (secondary Class 1) National Insurance has been 15% on pay above a secondary threshold of £5,000 a year since 6 April 2025, and continues at that rate into 2026/27. It is not the old 13.8% above £9,100, and any quote you were given on that basis understates your driver cost badly.

Take a driver on £34,000. Employer National Insurance is 15% of £29,000, which is £4,350. Pension auto-enrolment adds a minimum employer contribution of 3% of qualifying earnings, the band running from £6,240 to £50,270 (2025/26 thresholds), so 3% of £27,760 is £832.80. The driver costs your company £39,182.80 before overtime, night-out payments, holiday cover, employer's liability insurance and payroll software. Run twelve drivers on that pattern and employer National Insurance alone is £52,200 a year.

The offset is the Employment Allowance, worth £10,500 against your employer National Insurance bill. It is denied to a company whose only employee is a single director, which is the point at which many one-truck owner-drivers who incorporate discover they cannot claim it. Once you take on a driver who is not a director, you can. The arithmetic behind a hire is set out further in our page on the true cost of an employee in 2026/27.

Night-out payments and overnight subsistence

For an employed driver spending the night away, HMRC operates an approved overnight subsistence rate of £34.90 a night, in force since 1 January 2013, cut to 75% of that figure (about £26.20) where the driver uses a sleeper cab. Those rates are for employed drivers only, and they are payable free of tax and National Insurance only where HMRC's conditions at EIM66105 in its Employment Income Manual are met, which turn on a genuine overnight absence being incurred and evidenced. Pay the rate outside those conditions and it is simply taxable pay.

An owner-driver taxed as a sole trader does not use the flat rate. They deduct the actual reasonable cost of accommodation and meals incurred on an itinerant trade under the wholly and exclusively rule. The full comparison, employed rate against owner-driver actual costs, sits on our Heavy Goods Vehicle (HGV) driver expenses page.

Subcontracted drivers and status

Bringing in agency or self-employed drivers moves you into status territory. If a driver works through their own personal service company and your business is a medium or large client, the off-payroll working rules in Chapter 10, Part 2 of the Income Tax (Earnings and Pensions) Act 2003 put the status decision on you, not on them: from 6 April 2021 you issue a Status Determination Statement with reasons, and the fee-payer deducts PAYE if the engagement is inside IR35. If your business meets the small-company test, the driver's own company decides its status instead. Status turns on control, personal service, substitution and financial risk, not on the wording of the contract.

Obligation two: VAT on haulage

You must register for VAT once taxable turnover exceeds £90,000 in any rolling 12 months, or when you expect to exceed it in the next 30 days. A single truck on regular trunking work clears that inside a year, so the practical question for most operators is not whether to register but how quickly. Domestic haulage is standard rated at 20%.

Registration also unlocks input VAT on the things that eat your margin: diesel, tyres, repairs, parts, trailer hire and the vehicles themselves. Making Tax Digital (MTD) for VAT has applied to all VAT-registered businesses since April 2022, so your records must be digital and your returns must come from compatible software regardless of turnover. Fuel-card statements and telematics exports feed that well if the bookkeeping is set up to read them.

Two scheme decisions come up. Cash accounting, available while taxable turnover is £1.35 million or less, lets you account for VAT on payments received rather than invoices issued, which matters when a customer pays on 60 days and your fuel bill does not wait. The Flat Rate Scheme is available up to £150,000 of expected taxable turnover but rarely suits haulage: once you are buying diesel and parts, you are giving up real input VAT for a flat percentage. International movements have their own place-of-supply and zero-rating rules, and those are worth a specific conversation rather than an assumption.

Obligation three: vehicles and capital allowances

A tractor unit, a rigid, a trailer and a forklift are plant and machinery. None of them is a car, which is the point that matters, because cars are excluded from the Annual Investment Allowance and the first-year allowances while commercial vehicles are not.

The 2026/27 position, each figure date-tagged:

• Annual Investment Allowance: £1,000,000 per 12-month period, 100% relief, available to companies and sole traders alike.
• First-year allowance of 40% on new and unused main-rate plant and machinery where the spend is incurred on or after 1 January 2026 (Finance Act 2026 s.29). Second-hand vehicles do not qualify.
• Full expensing at 100% on new main-rate plant, companies only, permanent.
• Main-rate writing-down allowance: 18% until 1 April 2026 for corporation tax and 6 April 2026 for income tax, then 14% (Finance Act 2026 s.28). A period straddling that date uses a time-apportioned hybrid rate.
• Special-rate pool: 6%, unchanged, covering integral features in a depot or workshop.

Worked example: buying a tractor unit and a used trailer

Assume a limited company with a 31 March 2027 year end, taxable profit of £180,000 before allowances, and £1,000,000 of Annual Investment Allowance already used on a depot refit earlier in the year. On 1 July 2026 it buys a new and unused tractor unit for £110,000 and a second-hand trailer for £20,000.

Item	Cost	Relief route	Year-one allowance
New tractor unit	£110,000	40% first-year allowance (new and unused, on or after 1 Jan 2026)	£44,000
Balance of tractor unit into main pool	£66,000	Writing-down allowance at 14%	£9,240
Second-hand trailer	£20,000	Main pool only, no first-year allowance on used assets	£2,800
Total year-one allowances	£130,000		£56,040

Recompute it in four steps. £110,000 multiplied by 40% is £44,000. The remaining £66,000 goes into the main pool and attracts 14%, which is £9,240. The used trailer attracts no first-year allowance, so £20,000 at 14% gives £2,800. Add them and year-one relief is £56,040, leaving £73,960 carried in the pool at 14% a year afterwards.

Taxable profit falls from £180,000 to £123,960. At that level the company sits between the £50,000 and £250,000 corporation tax limits, so the profit taken out of the marginal band is relieved at the 26.5% effective marginal rate: £56,040 multiplied by 26.5% is £14,850.60 of corporation tax saved in the year. A company able to use full expensing instead would take 100% of the £110,000 in year one, and any operator with Annual Investment Allowance still available would take 100% on both vehicles. The reason to run all three routes rather than default to one is that the Annual Investment Allowance is use-it-or-lose-it within the period and cannot be carried forward. Our page on capital allowances on vans works the smaller-vehicle version of the same choice.

The stick rule for owner-drivers

If you are a sole-trader owner-driver rather than a company, you pick one of two methods per vehicle: simplified mileage rates, or actual running costs plus capital allowances. Approved Mileage Allowance Payment (AMAP) rates are 55p for the first 10,000 business miles and 25p thereafter from 6 April 2026, up from 45p. The choice sticks for as long as that vehicle is in the business, and you cannot use mileage rates on a vehicle for which capital allowances have already been claimed. For a truck doing real annual mileage with real fuel and maintenance bills, actual costs plus capital allowances almost always wins, but you only get to decide once per vehicle.

The Operator's Licence sits outside tax, and its costs sit inside it

Your Operator's Licence obligations are transport law and they are yours to hold, not your accountant's. What does concern us is that the licence brings a financial-standing requirement, and the traffic commissioner tests it against your actual available funds. That means your management accounts have to be current and credible rather than reconstructed at year end, and it means the way you finance vehicles shows up in a place other than the tax return. The licence fees and the associated professional costs are ordinary business expenses. Tachograph and drivers' hours compliance is likewise a transport-law matter and not something to take tax advice on.

What a transport accountant actually does for the fee

With the obligations set out, the service is easier to judge. A transport accountant should be running your driver payroll and real-time submissions, your VAT returns under Making Tax Digital, your year-end accounts and corporation tax return, and your capital allowances claim on every vehicle movement in and out of the fleet. That is the compliance floor and any competent firm meets it.

The part that changes your numbers is costing. Haulage margins are thin enough that a per-vehicle profit and loss, loaded with fuel, driver wages, tyres, maintenance, finance and depreciation, tells you more in a page than the statutory accounts tell you in twenty. The same applies per contract: a customer paying a good rate on a route that returns empty can lose you money that a well-paid backload would have covered. Ask any firm you are assessing how they would build that view from your fuel-card and telematics data, and how often you would see it.

Cash timing is the other pressure point, because you pay for diesel and wages weekly while customers pay on 30 to 60 days. That gap is a working-capital question, and if you are weighing up funding against it, our page on invoice finance for haulage and transport covers the finance product itself.

Do you need a specialist, and does location matter?

Postcode has stopped being the useful filter. Digital records mean a firm can serve an operator in Croydon, Dover, Inverness or anywhere else in the country without visiting the yard, and your data arrives as exports rather than as a box of paperwork. Search for a transport accountant near you if you want someone who will sit in your office, and search on sector knowledge if you want your numbers handled properly. The useful test is not the postcode: it is whether the firm can explain the 40% first-year allowance, the £5,000 secondary threshold and the £34.90 overnight rate without looking any of them up.

Specialist knowledge earns its keep at the points where transport differs from a generic small company: driver payroll volume, night-out payments, fleet capital allowances, subcontractor status, and international movements. Everything else, from the corporation tax return to director pay, is ordinary owner-managed company work. If you run a van fleet on platform work rather than trucks, the position is different again, and our pages for delivery drivers and Uber drivers deal with that ground.