If you’re using your home office as a location of self employed work (for example, if you’re using a room within your home as a home-office), you can claim towards expenses for this as discussed in previous sections of this guide.
If you’re using one room for the purpose of your business, and you need to carry out maintenance in the room (for example, if the floor needs replacing in the home office room only), you can include the full expense cost of this maintenance in your self assessment tax return.
If the maintenance is required on the entire property – for example, you need to repair the whole roof of the house, you would proportion the room against the number of rooms in your property, to find the appropriate amount to claim for the business use room.
Example:
Anna has 10 rooms in her house, and uses one exclusively for business purposes.
- The repair to the floor in the office room is £100
- The repair to the roof of the entire house is £200
The office floor cost is an expense wholly for the business, therefore £100 is claimed as business expense. The roof is shared between 10 rooms, therefore £20 can be added as a business expense
For reference, any maintenance on other rooms, even if you use them while running your business (e.g. a new toilet in the bathroom) cannot be claimed for business use in your accounts!