It's amazing the things you get used to. One thing we've noticed at RIFT is that the more you have to travel, the more it becomes just ‘part of the job’ in your mind. If travel to temporary workplaces is a big part of your work, it's easy to end up missing out. We spend a lot of time at RIFT getting people to think more about the money and time they spend travelling for work and helping them to claim it back.

Let's take a look at some hard facts to see how your journeys compare to the rest of the UK.

The first thing to realise is that the average UK commute is 2,200 miles per year by car alone. That means an average UK worker drives over 180 miles every month, just to get to work – and all that mileage costs money. Of course, not everyone travels by car. Train commuting costs average £3,454 per year – or £5,102 per year if you’re commuting into London—and the overall cost is going up faster than the rate of inflation each year.

So what does that actually mean? If you look at commuting as a whole, the average Brit is on the road or rails for 7.5 solid days over the course of a year, and they’re spending an average of £218 per month to do it. That stacks up to £2,616 a year in travel costs, which is up from £1,700 back in 2017 and more than the UK’s average monthly take-home pay! If you commute by car over the course of a typical working life of 50 years, we're talking about a total travel distance 110,000 miles. That’s like driving 4.5 times around the entire world - and spending £80,500 in fuel costs along the way!

The industries that many of our customers work in (Construction, CIS, Armed Forces, Offshore Oil and Gas, Security) involve a lot of travel to different sites and bases. This is the kind of travel that accounts for about 80% of your yearly tax refund claims. That’s why we’ve been able to put over £35 million of tax back in our customers’ pockets for their work-related travel costs in just the last 12 months.

Those figures obviously change over time. The COVID-19 pandemic saw average business mileage in the UK drop by 77% in 2022. Even so, work travel is rising again, with commuting alone already amounting to 14% of all UK travel. In 2022, UK commutes to work averaged 25 minutes each way by car, and 63 minutes each way by rail. These kinds of figures might drift up and down over the years, but all those hours, miles and pounds mount up fast.

On top of that, it’s worth remembering that we're all spending more and travelling further over a lifetime as the retirement age creeps up. It's more important than ever to understand what it's costing you to keep working- and what you should be claiming back.

Of course, things get really bad if you're dealing with a London commute...

To be fair, workers who actually live in London do tend to travel shorter distances, so they generally spend less overall. Even so, they're getting stung hard when you look at their proportional costs. If you live outside of London and commute in, your average travel time is probably around 74 minutes each way. As for what it’s costing you, you could easily be looking at £305 per month, or £3,660 per year. At those prices, a working lifetime in the Big Smoke leaves you coughing up more than £183,000 in travel costs over 363 days on the road. For those keeping score at home, Autotrader would sell you a used Ferrari 488 for less than that!

It's not all about the money, of course. Over the long term, a rough daily journey to work can be bad news for your physical and mental health as well. High-stress travel through rush-hour traffic shortens lives as well as careers. Long hours of work travel have been linked to poor eating habits and lack of exercise. After all, there only so many hours in a day for cooking and hitting the gym. Too much travel stress wears down your mind and your body. That's why it's so important to put thought into the miles and hours you're clocking up. It's also why you need to be sure you aren't overfeeding the taxman at the same time.

If you're travelling to temporary workplaces, and shelling out for it yourself, you need to be claiming your yearly tax refunds. So many people are still missing out, and ending up pumping millions of pounds too much into HMRC's pockets. That's money that could be going into looking after your health, or taking a much-needed holiday to de-stress yourself.

You can reclaim cash for the last 4 years of work travel, so it may not be too late to claim for years you've already missed. The average 4-year claim we see at RIFT comes to £3,000, so get in touch if you think you might qualify. It costs nothing to find out how much you're owed, and you don't pay a penny until your refund comes through.

Get in touch with RIFT get the ball rolling. We'll take care of the taxman, so you can take better care of yourself.