HGV and Lorry Driver Expenses: What the Meal and Overnight Allowances Actually Are

The rates that apply to you depend on whether a haulier employs you or you drive a heavy goods vehicle (HGV) as a self-employed owner-driver. They are not the same rates, and they do not work the same way.

Employed driver or owner-driver: the rates side by side

What you are claiming	Employed HGV driver (paid by an employer)	Self-employed owner-driver
Overnight away from home	Approved rate £34.90 per night (rate set 1 January 2013, still current for 2026/27)	No flat rate. Actual reasonable cost of the bed or the parking with facilities
Night spent in a sleeper cab	75% of the approved rate, about £26.20 per night	No flat rate. Actual cost of showers, parking, meals bought on the road
Condition attached	Tax and National Insurance free only where the driver is genuinely absent overnight on business and the employer's checking regime is approved by HMRC	Wholly and exclusively for the trade, and evidenced
Meals during a normal shift, home each night	Not covered by the overnight rate	Not deductible. Everyone has to eat, so ordinary daily food is not a trade cost
The lorry	Employer's asset, nothing for you to claim	Plant: Annual Investment Allowance £1,000,000, or 40% first-year allowance on a new and unused unit bought from 1 January 2026
Mileage in your own car or van for the business	55p per mile for the first 10,000 business miles from 6 April 2026, then 25p	Same rates, or actual costs, and the choice sticks per vehicle
Where the numbers land	Employer payroll, or an employment-expenses claim to HMRC	Self assessment, self-employment pages

Read the first column only if a haulier pays you through PAYE. Read the second only if you invoice for your own driving. If you do both in the same year, both columns apply to their own income, and you never move a figure from one to the other.

What is the £34.90 lorry driver overnight allowance?

It is HMRC's approved rate for the subsistence costs of an employed lorry driver who spends a night away from home in the course of the job. The figure has been £34.90 per night since 1 January 2013 and it has not been raised since, so any page quoting a higher round number is quoting something else. It is meant to cover the evening meal, breakfast, washing and the small incidental costs of a night on the road.

The rate is an approved amount an employer can pay without tax or National Insurance being due on it. It is not an entitlement. Whether you get paid a night-out rate at all, and how much, is a matter for your contract with the haulier. Plenty of firms pay more than £34.90; the excess above the approved rate is normal taxable pay and goes through payroll like wages.

When is the payment free of tax and National Insurance?

Three conditions sit behind the rate. You must be genuinely absent from home overnight on a business journey. The employer must operate a checking regime showing that drivers really were away on the nights paid for. And that regime has to carry HMRC approval.

Approval is the employer's job, not yours. If your firm pays the rate, the paperwork behind it is theirs to hold. If your firm has no approval in place, the payments are not automatically tax free, and that is a conversation for the transport office rather than something a driver can fix from the cab. We are describing the conditions here rather than the application route, because HMRC's current approval mechanics need checking with the department in each case.

How does the sleeper cab rate work?

If you sleep in the cab, you are not buying a bed, so the approved amount falls to 75%. Three quarters of £34.90 is £26.175, which HMRC treats as about £26.20 per night. That still leaves room for the meal, the shower at the truck stop and the incidentals, which is the point of the reduction rather than a penalty for using the cab.

The reduced figure is still an employed-driver rate with the same conditions attached. A sleeper cab does not turn a self-employed owner-driver into someone who can use it.

Can a self-employed lorry driver claim the overnight rate?

No. The £34.90 and the sleeper-cab 75% are rates for employees. As an owner-driver you are trading, and a trader deducts what the trade actually cost. Yours is an itinerant trade, meaning you have no fixed workplace and the road is where the work happens, so reasonable accommodation and subsistence away from base are deductible. The amount is what you spent, not a rate someone published.

That is worse than a flat rate on paperwork and often better on money. A night in a truck stop with a shower, a hot meal and secure parking can easily run past £26.20, and if it does, you deduct the higher real figure. What you cannot do is invent a nightly number, multiply it by your nights out and put that in a return. HMRC will ask what you spent, and the answer has to come from records.

What an owner-driver actually deducts

• Overnight parking with facilities, showers and secure lorry parks
• Meals bought while away overnight on the road, at cost
• Diesel, AdBlue, tyres, servicing, MOT and repairs on the unit
• Insurance, road tax, tolls, ferries and congestion or clean air charges
• Driver Certificate of Professional Competence periodic training and medicals
• Tachograph cards, trade subscriptions, work phone and the business share of the home admin space
• Capital allowances on the lorry and on trailers

Operator licence costs sit alongside these. An Operator's Licence is a legal obligation on whoever runs the vehicle, and the fees and the maintenance regime it demands are business costs of running it. We describe the obligation only; the licensing itself is a traffic commissioner matter, not a tax one.

Worked example: the same fortnight, two ways

Take a driver we will call Wes, running trunk work out of a depot near Carlisle. In a fortnight he is out for 8 nights, all of them slept in the sleeper cab, and he spends an average of £19 a night on a shower, an evening meal and breakfast, all receipted.

If Wes is employed by the haulier. The firm has an approved checking regime, so it can pay him the sleeper-cab rate of £26.20 per night. Eight nights at £26.20 is £209.60 for the fortnight, paid with no income tax and no National Insurance. Had the firm instead added that £209.60 to his wages, a basic-rate driver would pay 20% income tax on it, so £41.92, plus employee National Insurance, and the firm would pay employer National Insurance on top. The approved rate is worth the tax that never arises on it.

If Wes is a self-employed owner-driver. He gets no approved rate. He deducts what he spent: 8 nights at £19 is £152 for the fortnight. Scale that to a working year of 42 weeks at the same 4 nights a week, and it is 168 nights at £19, which is £3,192 of subsistence deducted from trading profit. A basic-rate sole trader pays 20% income tax plus 6% Class 4 National Insurance on profit in that band, the 6% Class 4 main rate set for 2025/26 and still current when this page was checked in August 2026, so 26% of £3,192, which is £829.92 of tax and National Insurance saved for the year.

The employed rate is simpler. The owner-driver figure is the one that moves with what you really spend, and on receipted nights above £26.20 it is the larger deduction. Neither route lets you claim both.

The lorry itself

A heavy goods vehicle is plant and machinery, not a car, so it is not stuck in the restrictive car rules. As an owner-driver you have two main routes for the purchase. The Annual Investment Allowance gives 100% relief on up to £1,000,000 of qualifying spend in a 12-month period, which covers a tractor unit outright in the year you buy it. Alternatively, a new and unused main-rate asset bought from 1 January 2026 qualifies for a 40% first-year allowance, with the balance going into the main pool and being written down at 14% from 6 April 2026 for income tax (the rate was 18% up to that date).

For a used unit, the Annual Investment Allowance is the route, because the 40% first-year allowance only applies to new and unused kit. Full expensing does not help a sole trader at all: it is a companies-only relief. If you run through a limited company, the company side is covered on our page for haulage and transport companies.

Mileage rates or actual costs on a smaller vehicle

If part of your work runs on a van or a car rather than an HGV, you pick a method per vehicle. Either you claim simplified mileage at the Approved Mileage Allowance Payment rates, 55p for the first 10,000 business miles from 6 April 2026 and 25p after that (45p and 25p for 2025/26 and earlier), or you claim actual running costs plus capital allowances.

The choice sticks for as long as that vehicle is in the business. Mileage rates on a van in year one shut off actual costs and capital allowances on that van for good, and a vehicle that has already taken a capital allowance can never go onto mileage rates. Pick before the first claim, not after. Multi-drop and courier work has its own version of the same fork, covered on our page for delivery drivers and our page for Uber drivers.

Value Added Tax and the owner-driver

Haulage services are standard rated. You only have to register for Value Added Tax once your taxable turnover passes £90,000 in any rolling 12-month period. A single owner-driver on subcontract rates can reach that faster than expected, because the threshold looks at turnover and not profit, so watch the rolling figure rather than the tax year. Registration also lets you recover the tax on diesel, repairs and the unit itself, which is why some owner-drivers register voluntarily before they have to.

Making Tax Digital for owner-drivers

Making Tax Digital for Income Tax brings quarterly digital updates for sole traders above the qualifying income thresholds, on top of the year-end return. The bands are gross qualifying income over £50,000 from 6 April 2026, over £30,000 from 6 April 2027 and over £20,000 from 6 April 2028, tested on turnover rather than profit, so a subcontract owner-driver is usually in from 2027. If you are an owner-driver keeping fuel receipts in the door pocket, that is the habit to change first, because quarterly updates need the records to already be digital rather than reconstructed in January.

How to claim, and who does it

Owner-drivers report everything through self assessment: register by 5 October after the end of your first tax year of trading, file online by 31 January, and pay the balancing payment on the same date. Employed drivers whose employer has not reimbursed genuine job expenses make an employment-expenses claim direct to HMRC. That claim is free to make and you make it yourself. We do not process expense claims for drivers, and a firm that offers to take a percentage of one is taking a percentage of money that was already yours.

If your position spans both, one employed job and one set of subcontract invoices, keep two sets of records from the start of the year. Splitting them in arrears is the expensive way to find out which nights belonged where.