What Allowable Expenses Can a Self-Employed Tutor Claim?

A self-employed tutor can claim any cost that is wholly and exclusively for the tutoring business. That covers teaching materials and exam-board resources, your DBS check, professional membership fees, a share of your home running costs, travel to students, tutoring software and platform fees, insurance, advertising, and accountancy costs. The list is long. But every item on it comes down to one test — the same test HMRC applies to every self-employed trader. Getting that test right matters more than memorising the list. It's what an inspector checks first, and what an accountant will ask you about.

This guide sets out that test. It walks through the expense categories a working tutor actually incurs, flags what you can't claim, and shows why the records that keep your tax return honest also keep your tutoring business defensible.

The test that decides every claim: wholly and exclusively

HMRC allows a self-employed trader to deduct a cost from taxable profit if it was incurred wholly and exclusively for the business. "Wholly" means the whole cost relates to the business, not partly to your personal life. "Exclusively" means the purpose of the spend was the business, not something with a private benefit attached. Where a cost genuinely serves both — your phone contract, your broadband, your car — you don't lose the claim entirely. You apportion it. Claim only the business-use share, and keep a record of how you worked that share out.

That test is why a laptop bought only for lesson planning and online lessons is a clean claim. A laptop shared with the rest of the household needs an honest business-use percentage instead. It's also why everyday clothing never qualifies, however professional it looks. A subject-specific resource you would never buy for any other reason always does. Keep that distinction in mind through the categories below — most tutoring expense questions come back to this one test.

Kit, materials and the tools you teach with

Teaching materials sit at the centre of the list: past papers, workbooks, printed worksheets, revision guides, stationery, and anything you buy specifically to plan or deliver a lesson. A printer used for lesson materials is allowable, along with the ink and paper that go through it. So is a laptop or tablet used for planning, marking or running online sessions — apportioned for personal use where the same device does double duty. Larger equipment is usually treated differently. A laptop, a graphics tablet, a webcam and microphone for online delivery are often capital costs rather than simple revenue expenses. That changes how and when you claim them, not whether you can. An accountant or HMRC's guidance on capital allowances will tell you which applies to your purchase.

Exam-board resources and subject-specific costs

This category separates a tutoring expense claim from a generic self-employment one. It's also the part most tutors under-claim, because it doesn't feel like "an expense" — it just looks like doing the job properly. Specifications, past papers and mark schemes you pay to access are allowable. So is exam-board membership or resource subscriptions, and subject-specific software — a maths graphing tool, a language-learning platform, an online whiteboard licence. There's no plausible personal use for a GCSE mark scheme, so these clear the wholly-and-exclusively test easily. Keep the receipt or subscription confirmation exactly as you would for any other cost. Exam boards issue proper invoices, so there's no excuse for this category going undocumented.

DBS checks, insurance and professional membership

The fee for a DBS check, and the fee for renewing or updating it, is an allowable expense. It exists because you tutor, for no other reason. The same logic covers professional indemnity or public liability insurance if you carry it, and membership of a relevant professional body or subject association — a tutoring association, or a subject-teaching organisation, where the membership supports your work as a tutor. Training sits nearby, with one distinction. A course that keeps skills you already use current — a refresher on a new exam specification, a session on a topic you already teach — is allowable. A course that trains you into a genuinely new profession or qualification is usually treated differently, because it builds a new capability rather than maintaining the one your business already runs on.

None of these costs are optional extras from a compliance point of view. They're also the exact costs a credible tutoring business needs to be able to show it has paid — which matters for the section below.

Working from home: the space you teach in

If you teach from home — online lessons from a spare room, or planning and marking between in-person sessions — you can claim a share of the running costs of that space. That's a proportion of your rent or mortgage interest, council tax, utilities and home insurance, apportioned by how much of your home and time the tutoring actually uses. Working out an exact apportionment can be fiddly. HMRC offers a simplified flat rate instead of totting up actual costs, banded by how many hours a month you work from home. According to HMRC's simplified expenses guidance, the flat rate runs from £10 a month at 25–50 hours up to £26 a month at 101 or more hours. The flat rate is usually lower than a tutor's real apportioned costs. It's worth doing the actual sum once, to see which method leaves you better off, then sticking with it.

Getting to students, being found, and running the admin

Travel to a student's home, a library or another agreed teaching location counts as a business journey. HMRC's Approved Mileage Allowance Payment rates let you claim a flat amount per mile instead of tracking actual fuel and running costs. According to HMRC, that's 45p a mile for the first 10,000 business miles in a tax year, then 25p a mile after that. Public transport fares to reach a student are equally claimable, kept to the receipt.

Beyond travel, the tools that let you run tutoring as a business are allowable too: video-calling or lesson-delivery software, scheduling and booking tools, the fees you pay a platform to be found and take payment, a website or portfolio, paid advertising, business cards, and accountancy or bookkeeping fees. None of these have a plausible personal use, so the wholly-and-exclusively test clears them without much thought. The discipline is simply keeping every receipt and invoice as it comes in — not reconstructing a year of subscriptions from memory in January.

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

Ordinary clothing is never allowable, even if you only wear it to teach. HMRC draws a hard line between clothing that happens to be worn for work and a genuine uniform or protective kit. "Smart clothes for client meetings" falls on the wrong side of that line. Childcare for your own children while you tutor is excluded. So is entertaining clients, fines and penalties, and the private share of anything you apportion — personal calls on your phone, weekend use of your work laptop. All of these fail the exclusively-for-the-business half of the test, whatever they cost you.

The genuine grey area is mixed-use items: the phone, the broadband, the car, the laptop everyone in the house borrows. The safe approach isn't to avoid claiming these. It's to work out a defensible business-use percentage, apply it consistently, and be able to explain how you reached it if anyone ever asks. A rough note made once, at the point you start the claim, is worth far more than a number you'd have to invent under questioning eighteen months later.

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

It's worth being explicit about why this level of record-keeping pays off twice. On Tutorwise, a tutor's credibility isn't a self-written bio a parent has to take on trust. It's a score the platform computes from real, verifiable signals: a confirmed identity check, a verified DBS check, the qualifications you hold, the track record you build delivering real sessions, and the reviews those sessions earn. Keeping your DBS renewal, insurance, membership and qualification evidence current and on file isn't just what an accountant asks for at year-end. It's the same paperwork that keeps those verified signals current on your profile — which is what a parent is actually checking when they compare you against another tutor's listing.

Put concretely: a tutor who lets a DBS check lapse, or can't produce evidence of the qualification listed on their profile, isn't just carrying a tax-record gap. They're carrying a credibility gap a parent can see, because Tutorwise surfaces verification status rather than asking a family to take a tutor's word for it. A tutor who treats renewal dates and receipts as routine business admin — the same discipline this guide is asking you to build for HMRC — keeps both stories straight with the same folder of paperwork. The expenses checklist and the credibility score aren't really two separate jobs. They're the same habit, pointed at two different audiences.

A record-keeping system that takes ten minutes a week

You don't need software or an accountant on retainer to keep this defensible. A single spreadsheet, or a dedicated folder — physical or in your email — is enough for most sole-trader tutors. One line per expense: the date, what it was, who you paid, the amount, and which category it falls into. Photograph or forward the receipt the day you spend the money, rather than saving the task for January. If a cost is mixed-use, note your business-use percentage and a one-line reason for it at the same time, while you still remember why you chose that figure. 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 too, not just the tax side.

Once your expenses are tracked, the bigger picture — what you owe, when, and whether you're even over the threshold that requires you to register — is covered in our guide to tax and Self Assessment for private tutors. And if your tutoring income has grown to the point where 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. 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 use HMRC's simplified flat rate for working from home instead of calculating actual costs — whichever leaves you better off and is simpler 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. 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.