Retail, Hospitality and Hairdressing: Claiming the £60 Standard Flat Rate

Look down HMRC's flat rate expenses table and you will find agreed figures for pattern makers, seamen on cargo vessels, glass workers and quarrymen. What you will not find is shop assistants, bar staff, waiting staff or hairdressers. Millions of people work in those trades and none of them has an entry of their own. That does not mean there is no claim. It means the general rule applies, and GOV.UK sets that at £60 a year for employees who maintain a uniform in an occupation with no agreed rate.

Why These Trades Have No Listed Rate

The industry-specific figures in HMRC's table came out of negotiations, mostly decades ago, between HMRC and trade unions or employer bodies in industries with heavy, dirty or specialist clothing. Retail, hospitality and hairdressing never went through that process, so no figure was ever agreed for them.

The fallback is set out on GOV.UK's guidance on job expenses for uniforms, work clothing and tools: where your job is not shown in the table, the flat rate is £60. There is one small wrinkle worth knowing. The table does contain an entry for the food industry at £60 for all workers, so someone on a supermarket deli counter or in a bakery arrives at the same number by a different route.

What £60 Is Actually Worth

Nobody is retiring on it. It is still your money, the claim takes about ten minutes once, and after that the allowance stays in your tax code without you doing anything again.

The Test That Decides Whether You Qualify

This is the part that matters, and it is where most people in these trades either wrongly assume they cannot claim, or wrongly assume they can.

GOV.UK draws the line clearly. You can claim for "cleaning, repairing or replacing a uniform or specialist clothing". You cannot claim for "cleaning, repairing or replacing everyday clothing you wear for work (even if you must wear a certain design or colour)". That bracketed phrase is doing all the work.

The practical test HMRC applies is whether the clothing is recognisable as a uniform, meaning it carries a permanent and conspicuous badge or logo, or is clearly specialist protective kit. A hairdresser in a branded tunic qualifies. A hairdresser told to wear black qualifies for nothing.

You Also Have to Be the One Paying

The flat rate covers washing, repairing and replacing. If your employer runs a laundry service, gives you a cleaning allowance in your pay, or reimburses you for replacements, you are not bearing the cost and there is no claim. Most retail and hospitality employers issue the uniform and leave the washing to you, which is exactly the situation the relief exists for.

One more condition catches a lot of people in these trades: the relief reduces your taxable income, so it only produces cash if you actually pay income tax. Someone working sixteen hours a week on the minimum wage may well earn under the £12,570 personal allowance, in which case the claim is worth nothing that year. Check the total pay figure on your P60 before you bother.

Part-Time, Agency and Seasonal Staff

The flat rate is not pro-rated. Twelve hours a week and thirty-nine hours a week both attract £60, provided you wore and maintained the uniform and paid tax that year. That makes it relatively more valuable to part-time workers, at least as a proportion of what they earn.

Agency workers on PAYE can claim in the same way, and so can anyone on a zero-hours contract. The thing that matters is being an employee taxed through PAYE, not the shape of the contract. If you are genuinely self-employed, this relief is not the right route and you deduct the actual costs as a business expense instead.

If you worked at two different places in the same year, that does not double the allowance. It is one £60 per tax year, not one per employer.

Making the Claim

1. Gather three things: your National Insurance number, your employer's name, and their PAYE reference, which appears on your payslip or P60. If you are claiming for earlier years you need the same for each employer.
2. Sign in to your Personal Tax Account on GOV.UK and open the service for claiming tax relief on employment expenses.
3. Choose the uniform, work clothing and tools option and tick every tax year you are claiming for.
4. Select your occupation. If there is no entry that matches your job, the standard £60 rate is what applies.
5. Submit. No receipts are needed for a flat rate claim, and HMRC confirmed that flat rate expenses are exempt from the evidence requirements it brought in for other employment expenses from 14 October 2024.

If you cannot get through the Government Gateway identity checks, form P87 does the same job by post. It takes longer, and it is still free.

The Backdating Is Most of the Money

You can claim for the current tax year and the four before it. During 2026/27 that means 2026/27, 2025/26, 2024/25, 2023/24 and 2022/23. Each year has its own deadline of 5 April four years after it ended, so 2022/23 has to be claimed by 5 April 2027. Once a year closes it cannot be reopened.

You do not need to have worked the whole of each year, and you do not need to still be in the job. If you spent 2023/24 in a branded uniform at a supermarket and now work in an office, that year is still claimable.

After You Have Claimed

Closed years are repaid directly to you. The current year and future years are handled by changing your tax code, so someone on 1257L would move to 1263L, reflecting £12,630 of tax-free pay. That is roughly a pound a month, which is why nobody notices, and also why it is worth doing once and then forgetting about it.

If you later move into a job with no uniform, tell HMRC so the allowance comes out of your code. Leaving it in place quietly builds an underpayment that HMRC will collect from you later.