The Gabem Umbrella Companies Blog:
Home of Umbrella Company Gossip Online

Anyone who's had to do any driving for work over the last year or so will be very aware of the ever widening gulf between the 40p per mile mileage allowance and the 133p per litre cost of petrol.

So it's good to see the budget making at least a token effort by increasing the per mile allowance to 45p. Obviously we'd prefer it to be higher (back when I started if your car had an engine size over 2 litres it was 63p, those were the days), but I suppose that we all have to do our bit to help the economy.

In other good mileage expense news, those of you working through umbrella companies will all be pleased to hear that your yearly mileage totals will be resetting on April 6th. So if you exceeded 10,000 miles and had dropped to the lower 20p per mile rate, any mileage you do from then will be back starting fresh on the new 45p rate.

There are two other pieces of significant budget news, but it's an even split between good and bad news. The good news is that tax free allowances have increased once again (up to £7475 for those on a 747L tax code), which is great. But the bad news is that the national insurance payments for both employers and employees have increased by 1% each for all of us.

So what's the net result? The majority of us will be slightly better off than last year, but even if you're effected negatively by the NI increases, you may still end up better off because of the mileage expense changes, just make sure you are actually claiming.

Hugo
@GabemUmbrella
01/04/2011