Company covering property rental cost

[sionsmith]

Good Afternoon all,

I have spent the past couple of ours searching around the wonderful 'World Wide Web' with no definite answer. I am about to take out a new rental contract on a property here in London, its my primary residence, I will be registered to no other property or area in the UK - is there anyway I can take this rental contract out in the company name or claim it as an expense?

One thing which confuses me is, lots of prime properties in London get snatched up by investment banks for their employees - how come they are about to put these properties through as expenses but we can't?

Any information would be extremely grateful as I seem to be going around in circles.

Thanks

[Dearnla]

You're fishing for the "right" answer i.e. "Yes of course it's perfectly possible".

Whereas common sense says it's not legit to do so.

Still, there's one way to find out - stick your returns in to HMRC (without lying) and see what they say......

[Clare@InTouch]

It's your only residence, so you'd have to incur the cost whether you were in business or not. It's not therefore wholly, exclusively or necessarily for business purposes, so no.

Or yes, but it would be a benefit in kind and you'd be taxed on it, in which case you'd probably be worse off as it's PAYE rates (rather than withdrawing the money as a dividend and paying the rent personally).

The investment bankers may have primary residences elsewhere, or maybe it's treated as a benefit in kind.

[SueEllen]

Good Afternoon all,

I have spent the past couple of ours searching around the wonderful 'World Wide Web' with no definite answer. I am about to take out a new rental contract on a property here in London, its my primary residence, I will be registered to no other property or area in the UK - is there anyway I can take this rental contract out in the company name or claim it as an expense?

You can claim expenses for using a room as a home office i.e cost of heating and electricity. However the room should be just that.

One thing which confuses me is, lots of prime properties in London get snatched up by investment banks for their employees - how come they are about to put these properties through as expenses but we can't?

It's not their primary residence.

When employees are placed on secondment and housed by the company the residence isn't their primary residence as they have a house elsewhere. If the employee is allowed to stay in a company flat due to a permanent transfer to another office location they are only allowed a limited stay in the company flat.