Employers wishing to pay or reimburse travel expenses may use the meal allowance benchmark rates, these are the amounts that employees can spend while on work trips for meals and have no tax or NI implications where the relevant qualifying conditions are met.
These rates are the maximum tax and NICs free amounts that can be paid by employers who choose to use the system. An employer can pay less than these rates if it wants to do so. Any excess over the published rate should be subject to tax and NIC’s.
Rates are set as follows –
| Minimum journey time | Maximum amount of meal allowance |
| 5 hours | £5 |
| 10 hours | £10 |
| 15 hours (and ongoing at 8pm) | £25 |
Qualifying conditions
The qualifying conditions are:
- the travel must be in the performance of an employee’s duties or to a temporary place of work, on a journey that is not substantially ordinary commuting.
- the employee should be absent from his normal place of work or home for a continuous period more than five hours or ten hours.
- the employee should have incurred a cost on a meal (food and drink) after starting the journey and retained appropriate evidence of their expenditure.
Employers are NOT required to operate a system for checking an employee’s expenditure to make payments free of tax in relation to expenses paid or reimbursed using benchmark scale rates. Instead, employers will only be required to ensure that employees are undertaking qualifying travel on occasions in respect of which a payment is made or reimbursed and that neither the employer nor any other person knows or suspects or could reasonably be expected to know or suspect, that travel was not undertaken.
