What Allowable Expenses Can a Self-Employed Tutor Claim?

If a cost exists only because you tutor, HMRC lets you deduct it from your taxable profit — that single rule covers almost everything a self-employed tutor spends money on. Past papers and revision guides, your DBS check, membership of a subject association, a slice of your household bills, mileage to a student's house, the platform fees and software that keep your business running, insurance, marketing, and your accountant's invoice all qualify. Tutors who don't know the rule tend to under-claim, not over-claim — and every expense left off the list is tax paid on money you didn't actually keep. Learn the test once and every item on the list becomes obvious.

This guide walks through that test, works through the categories a tutor's spending actually falls into, flags the handful of things HMRC will never allow, and explains why the paperwork that satisfies a tax inspector is the same paperwork that keeps your Tutorwise profile looking credible.

The test that decides every claim: wholly and exclusively

Every deductible cost for a sole trader has to clear the same bar: it must be incurred wholly and exclusively for the business. "Wholly" rules out anything that's only partly business-related. "Exclusively" rules out anything bought with a private motive attached, even a small one. A cost that genuinely straddles both your business and your life — your phone, your broadband, your car — isn't disqualified outright. You split it, claim the business-use portion, and note down how you arrived at that split so you can explain it later.

That's the whole logic behind why a laptop bought purely to plan lessons and run online sessions is an easy claim, while the same laptop shared with your household needs a fair business-use percentage attached instead. It's also why a smart jumper worn to a client's house is never claimable, no matter how "for work" it feels, while a subject resource you'd never buy for any reason other than tutoring always is. Hold that test in mind as you read the categories below — nearly every expense question a tutor has comes back to it.

Kit, materials and the tools you teach with

Start with the obvious layer: past papers, workbooks, printed worksheets, revision guides, stationery, and anything else bought specifically to plan or run a lesson. If a printer is used for lesson materials, the printer, ink and paper are all allowable. The same goes for a laptop or tablet used to plan, mark or deliver online sessions, apportioned where the device also does personal duty. Bigger-ticket items sit in a different bracket — a laptop, a graphics tablet, or a webcam and microphone bought for online delivery are often capital expenditure rather than a straightforward revenue expense, which changes the timing and mechanism of the claim rather than whether you can make it. Check with an accountant or HMRC's capital allowances guidance before assuming which treatment applies to a specific purchase.

Exam-board resources and subject-specific costs

This is the category that separates a genuine tutoring expense claim from a generic self-employed one — and it's also the one most tutors quietly under-claim, because paying for a specification or a mark scheme feels like part of doing the job, not like "an expense" in the accounting sense. Specifications, past papers and mark schemes you pay to access clear the wholly-and-exclusively test without any argument, because nobody buys a GCSE mark scheme for personal reasons. The same logic covers exam-board membership, resource subscriptions, and subject-specific software — a graphing calculator app, a language-learning platform licence, an online whiteboard subscription. Exam boards issue proper invoices for all of this, so there's no reason for the paperwork to go missing.

DBS checks, insurance and professional membership

A DBS check, and the fee to renew or update one, is allowable because the only reason you're paying for it is that you tutor. The same principle covers professional indemnity or public liability insurance where you carry it, and membership of a tutoring association or subject-teaching body that supports the work you do. Training is allowable too, but with one line drawn through it: a course that refreshes skills you already use — catching up on a revised exam specification, a session on a topic already in your teaching — is a deductible cost, while a course that trains you into a different profession or a new qualification generally isn't, because it builds a capability your business doesn't already run on rather than maintaining one it does.

None of this is optional paperwork you can let slide. It's also exactly the evidence a credible tutoring business needs on file — which matters for the section further down.

Working from home: the space you teach in

Tutoring from a spare room, or planning and marking between in-person sessions, earns you a share of the running costs of that space: a portion of rent or mortgage interest, council tax, utility bills and home insurance, apportioned by how much of your home and time the work actually takes up. Calculating that apportionment precisely can turn into a lot of fiddly arithmetic, so HMRC offers a simplified flat-rate alternative instead, banded by monthly hours worked from home. According to HMRC's simplified expenses guidance, the flat rate starts at £10 a month for 25–50 hours and rises to £26 a month at 101 hours or more. The flat rate usually comes out lower than a tutor's actual apportioned costs, so it's worth running the real calculation once to see which method leaves you better off, then sticking with whichever one you picked.

Getting to students, being found, and running the admin

A journey to a student's home, a library, or any other agreed teaching location is a business journey. HMRC's Approved Mileage Allowance Payment scheme lets you claim a flat rate per mile rather than tracking fuel and running costs separately — according to HMRC, that's 45p a mile for the first 10,000 business miles in a tax year, dropping to 25p a mile after that. Bus or train fares to reach a student are claimable on the same basis, backed by the receipt.

Beyond getting to the lesson, the infrastructure that turns tutoring into a business is allowable too: video-calling and lesson-delivery software, scheduling and booking tools, the fees a platform charges to be found and get paid, a website or portfolio, paid advertising, business cards, and your accountant's or bookkeeper's fees. None of these have any plausible personal use, so they clear the wholly-and-exclusively test with no real argument needed. The only discipline required is filing each receipt and invoice as it lands, rather than trying to reconstruct twelve months of subscriptions from memory in January.

What you can't claim, and the grey area in between

Everyday clothing is never allowable, even the outfit you specifically keep for teaching. HMRC draws a firm line between clothes that happen to get worn at work and a genuine uniform or protective kit — "smart clothes for client meetings" sits on the wrong side of that line every time. Childcare for your own children while you're delivering a lesson doesn't qualify either. Nor does entertaining clients, fines and penalties, or the private slice of anything you split between business and personal use — the personal calls on your phone, the weekend use of your work laptop. Each of these fails the exclusively-for-business half of the test regardless of how work-adjacent it feels.

The real grey area is mixed-use items — the phone, the broadband, the car, the laptop the whole household shares. The right response isn't to avoid claiming them; it's to settle on a defensible business-use percentage, apply it the same way every time, and keep a note of how you reached that figure. A rough note jotted down when you first make the claim is worth far more than a number you have to invent under questioning eighteen months later.

The same records that satisfy HMRC also build your Tutorwise credibility score

It's worth spelling out why this record-keeping pays off in two places at once. On Tutorwise, credibility isn't a bio a tutor writes about themselves that a parent has to take on trust — it's a score the platform computes from verifiable signals: a confirmed identity check, a verified DBS check, the qualifications on file, the track record built from real delivered sessions, and the reviews those sessions generate. Keeping your DBS renewal date, insurance certificate, membership receipt and qualification evidence current isn't only something your accountant asks for at year-end. It's the same evidence that keeps those verified signals live on your profile — which is what a parent is actually comparing when they weigh you against another tutor's listing.

Put another way: a tutor whose DBS check has lapsed, or who can't produce proof of the qualification listed on their profile, isn't only carrying a gap in their tax records. They're carrying a visible credibility gap, because Tutorwise shows verification status rather than asking a family to take a tutor's claims on trust. A tutor who treats renewal dates and receipts as routine admin — exactly the discipline this guide is describing for HMRC purposes — keeps both stories straight from a single folder of paperwork. The expense checklist and the credibility score aren't two separate chores. They're one habit, read by two different audiences.

A record-keeping system that takes ten minutes a week

None of this needs accounting software or a retainer with a bookkeeper. A single spreadsheet, or a dedicated folder — paper or in your inbox — covers most sole-trader tutors. One row per expense: date, description, who was paid, amount, and category. Photograph or forward the receipt on the day you spend the money rather than leaving the task for January. When a cost is mixed-use, jot down the business-use percentage and a one-line reason for it at the same time, while the reasoning is still fresh. Our companion guide on record-keeping for tutors covers how long to keep each type of record, and why the same habit protects you on the safeguarding side, not only the tax side.

Once your expenses are under control, the bigger question — what you owe, when it's due, and whether your income has crossed the threshold that requires registration — is covered in our guide to tax and Self Assessment for private tutors. And if your tutoring income has grown enough that the sole-trader structure itself is worth questioning, our sole trader versus limited company guide walks through that decision honestly, including how it changes what and how you claim.

Frequently asked questions

Can I claim my DBS check as a tutoring expense? Yes. The fee for the check itself, and for renewing or updating it, is wholly and exclusively for your tutoring, so it's an allowable expense. Keep the payment confirmation with your other records.

Can I claim a proportion of my rent or mortgage for tutoring from home? Yes, apportioned by how much of your home and time the tutoring uses — or you can use HMRC's simplified flat rate for working from home instead of calculating actual costs, whichever leaves you better off and is easier to keep consistent.

Can I claim my laptop if I also use it personally? You can claim the business-use share, not the full cost. Larger equipment like a laptop is often a capital cost rather than a simple expense, so work out a reasonable business-use percentage and keep a note of how you reached it.

Does claiming exam-board resources as an expense look different from other tutoring costs? No. Specifications, past papers and mark schemes you pay for meet the same wholly-and-exclusively test as any other tutoring cost. They're claimed the same way — just easy to overlook, because they feel like part of the job rather than "an expense".

Do my expense records actually affect my credibility score on Tutorwise? Not directly. CaaS scores verified signals like your DBS check, identity verification and delivered track record, not your bookkeeping. But the same discipline that keeps clean expense records also keeps those underlying signals — like a current DBS renewal — verified and visible on your profile.

More in this series

Part of a series on running a tutoring business on Tutorwise: How to Scale From Solo Tutor to a Tutoring Business, Systems and Automation for a Tutoring Business, and How to Price Tutoring Packages Without Discounting.