A self-employed parcel round is taxed like any other self-employment — SA103S, profit after allowable expenses, Class 2 and Class 4 National Insurance — but the records look different from a food courier’s, because the work does. You collect from a depot, you run a route that barely changes, and you very likely do it in a van you bought, hired or leased. Each of those three facts changes what you need to have kept, and the third one changes it most.
How is a parcel round different from food delivery for tax?
Three ways: there is a fixed place you start from, the route repeats, and the vehicle is usually a van rather than a car or a bike. The depot introduces a commuting question that food couriers rarely face. The repetition makes the mileage claim large and highly regular, which is a strength when it is evidenced and a weakness when it is estimated. And a van shifts the vehicle-expense decision, because vans are bought, financed or hired in ways cars often are not.
What does not change is the framework. You are self-employed, you register with HMRC once your income passes the trading allowance it publishes, you get a UTR, and you file by the 31 January after the 5 April year end. If you were instead taken on through an agency or partner firm and are paid through PAYE, that is a different position entirely — the article on courier engagement arrangements elsewhere on this blog covers how to tell.
Is the drive to the depot business mileage or commuting?
It is the question a parcel round has and a food round does not, and the honest answer is that it depends on whether the depot counts as a regular place of work under HMRC’s rules — so take the position from guidance or an accountant rather than from what feels fair. Travel between home and a regular workplace is generally treated as commuting and is generally not deductible, however early the start and however self-employed you are.
Where the answer genuinely turns on your facts — a base you attend only sometimes, a home used as the business base, a round that starts before the depot — it is worth settling once, in writing, and then applying the same rule every day. Consistency is itself evidence: a log where the same journey is always classified the same way reads as a system rather than an improvisation.
The practical move is to record the depot leg regardless and classify it by rule. A journey captured and categorised as commuting costs you nothing and keeps the decision reversible if your circumstances or the guidance change. A journey never recorded cannot be reclassified into anything.
What does the round itself require you to record?
Per-trip distance with endpoints and purpose, exactly as any mileage claim requires — but a round produces dozens of short legs a day, and that volume is what makes the recording method matter. A day of a hundred drops between closely spaced addresses is a hundred small distances, and the difference between capturing them and estimating them compounds across a year into a number you either can or cannot support.
On the money side, keep the round’s statements and any self-billed invoices, downloaded and stored yourself. Note anything deducted before payment — franchise or service charges, scanner or handheld fees, insurance arranged through the operator — because money withheld upstream is still your expense and still belongs in the accounts. Describe it from your own statement rather than from an assumption about what a given operator charges; those arrangements differ and change.
How do you handle a van you bought, hired or leased?
The three routes are treated differently, and which one you are on determines whether the simplified mileage basis is even available to you. Under simplified expenses you claim a flat amount per business mile for the van and nothing else for its running; the flat rate absorbs fuel, insurance, servicing and depreciation. Under actual costs you claim the real running costs apportioned to business use, and a bought van is relieved through capital allowances rather than as a straight expense — which is a meaningfully different mechanism with its own rules.
A hired or leased van is not a purchase, so the payments are generally a running cost rather than a capital item, subject to HMRC’s rules on lease deductions. The important structural point is that you cannot mix: claiming the flat mileage rate for a vehicle and then also claiming its fuel, insurance or capital allowances is double-counting the same cost. Pick one basis per vehicle, and pick it knowingly — the choice is sticky, as the mileage-versus-running-costs article explains.
Either way you need the mileage log. The flat rate multiplies it by a published figure. The actual-cost method uses it to prove the business proportion of everything else. There is no version of the van claim that works without it.
What else does a round cost that people forget to claim?
The costs that are specific to running a round rather than to driving, which is why generic gig-work advice misses them. Walk this list at year end:
Claim what the evidence supports and no more. A cost that is genuinely for the business and genuinely documented is a deduction; the same cost with no record behind it is, for tax purposes, indistinguishable from a cost that never happened.
- Goods-in-transit and hire-and-reward insurance taken out because of the work
- Scanner, handheld or phone costs, and the business share of the data plan
- Cover: paying another driver to run the round while you were ill or away
- Parking at the depot or on the round, and any clean-air or congestion charge on a business journey
- Van cleaning, load-space fittings, shelving, straps and protective equipment
- Accountancy fees for the self-employment pages, and record-keeping software
Why does a repetitive round make an automatic log more valuable, not less?
Because repetition is what makes a manual log look invented. The intuition runs the other way — the route is the same every day, so surely you can multiply one day by the number of days worked — and that is exactly the reconstruction pattern that reads badly: identical distances, round numbers, no variation, no personal journeys. Real rounds are not identical. Drops get added, roads close, you double back for a failed delivery, and some days finish early.
An automatic log captures that texture for free, and the texture is the credibility. It also captures the thing multiplication silently drops: the days you did not work, the extra leg back to the depot, the stop at the fuel station, the personal detour at the end of the round. A log that includes the personal journeys, marked as personal, is a far stronger document than one in which the van apparently never went to a supermarket.
There is a second, unglamorous reason. A round is a high-volume, low-drama job, and high-volume low-drama jobs are where manual recording quietly stops happening around week six. Removing the daily decision to record anything is the only version of this that survives a year.
What should the year end look like?
An afternoon of reading, if the records were kept: reconcile the operator’s statements against your own ledger, confirm the mileage log covers every working day with no unexplained gaps, sweep the expense list above for anything bought and not recorded, and export the whole year — trips with routes, expenses with receipts, income by source — to storage you control. Then hand that package to whoever prepares your return.
The difference an organised export makes is practical rather than rhetorical. An accountant given complete records spends their hours on the judgment calls that are worth their fee — the depot question, the van basis, the boundary entries around 5 April — instead of on typing your year in from a carrier bag.
BrewGig is an independent product and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or partnered with Evri or any parcel or delivery operator; all company names are the trade marks of their respective owners, used here only to describe how the work functions.