Before you can answer "do I need to do a Self Assessment for Just Eat", you have to answer a prior question: were you taken on as a self-employed courier, or engaged through a partner firm that pays you through PAYE? The two are taxed completely differently — one files a return and claims expenses against profit, the other has tax deducted before payment and may have nothing to file at all. Delivery platforms in the UK have used both shapes, sometimes in the same year and the same city, so the answer is in your own paperwork rather than in anything a blog post can assert.
Are Just Eat couriers self-employed?
Some delivery work is done as a self-employed courier and some is arranged through an intermediary — a courier partner, an agency or a fleet operator — that engages you as a worker or an employee and pays you through PAYE. Platforms have operated both arrangements, and they differ by area and change over time, so the only reliable answer is the one your contract and your payment records give.
This is not a technicality you can safely ignore. It decides whether the money you receive is gross or already taxed, whether your delivery costs are deductible against it, whether you need a UTR at all, and whether missing the 31 January deadline is a problem for you or irrelevant to you. Getting it wrong in either direction produces work later: an unfiled return that should have been filed, or a return declaring income that was already taxed at source.
How do you tell which one you are?
Look at what you receive when you get paid, because the paperwork is unambiguous even when the job title is not. Work through these:
One more signal: whether you were asked for a UTR when you signed up. A platform engaging self-employed couriers generally needs your tax reference; an employer needs your National Insurance number and a starter declaration instead. If the evidence still points both ways — which happens when someone moves between arrangements mid-year — ask the firm that pays you, in writing, what your engagement status is for tax purposes.
- Is there a payslip showing Income Tax and National Insurance deducted before payment? That is PAYE.
- Do you receive a statement of jobs and a gross figure with nothing deducted for tax? That is self-employment.
- Did you get a P60 after the tax year ended, or a P45 when you stopped? Both are employment documents.
- Do you, or does the platform on your behalf, raise a self-billing invoice for your work? That is a self-employed shape.
- Does the agreement describe you as a contractor providing services, or as a worker or employee of the firm?
What do you file if you are self-employed?
The standard Self Assessment route: register with HMRC once your self-employment income passes the trading allowance it publishes, receive a UTR, and file an SA100 with the self-employment pages — SA103S for most couriers, SA103F where HMRC’s turnover condition requires the full version. Registration for the year you started is due by the following 5 October, and the online return and payment are due by the 31 January after the tax year ends.
On those pages you report your income from delivery work and the allowable expenses against it: the vehicle, on either the simplified mileage basis or actual running costs; the business share of your phone; the bag, the equipment, the insurance the work required; the fees the platform withheld before the money reached you. Class 2 and Class 4 National Insurance fall out of the same profit figure. The tax is on what is left, not on what the app paid.
What changes if you are paid through PAYE by a partner firm?
Your tax is deducted before you are paid, and in the simplest case you file nothing. The employment is reported by the employer, your code does the work, and the P60 at year end is the record. The consequence people find harder is the other side of that bargain: an employee generally cannot deduct delivery running costs the way a self-employed courier can, and the rules for employees claiming travel and equipment costs are much tighter. The costs did not disappear — they stopped being deductible in the way the self-employed model allows.
You may still need a return for other reasons: a second self-employed income, income above the levels at which HMRC asks for a return, or a claim you want to make. If you genuinely cannot tell whether one is due, HMRC publishes a check, and an accountant will answer it in one conversation.
What if you did both in the same tax year?
One return covers both — the employment pages carry the PAYE income from the P45 or P60, and SA103S carries the self-employed period. That is by far the most common situation for couriers, because arrangements change, people move between platforms, and a lot of delivery work sits alongside a main job. The tax calculation then runs across the whole picture rather than each source in isolation, which is why a modest side income can be taxed at a higher rate than its size suggests.
The practical trap is the boundary. The pay covering the week an arrangement changed, the final PAYE payment landing after you had already started invoicing, the first self-employed payout for a job done under the old shape — each needs to land on the correct side of 5 April and under the correct heading. Note the change of arrangement in your records on the day it happens, with the date, and the boundary sorts itself out at filing time.
What should you keep either way?
Everything that documents what you were paid and what the work cost — because if you turn out to be self-employed, that record is the deduction, and if you turn out to be employed, it costs you an afternoon to have kept it. Specifically: the weekly statements or payslips, downloaded rather than left in an account you may lose access to; a per-trip mileage log for every business journey; a photograph of each receipt attached to a note of what it was for; and the contract or engagement terms you signed.
The mileage log deserves its own emphasis, because it is the only item on that list that cannot be recovered later. A statement can be re-downloaded and a receipt can sometimes be reissued. The distance you drove last Tuesday exists only if something wrote it down at the time.
BrewGig is an independent product and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or partnered with Just Eat or any delivery platform; all platform names are the trade marks of their respective owners, used here only to describe how the work functions.