20 Limited Company Expenses You May Be Missing

A director pays roughly £100 a month for life cover through his company. Buy the same policy personally, from after-tax income, and the real cost works out at £150 to £200 a month once you account for the tax already paid on that money. It's one policy, one phone call to switch, and a saving of 40 to 50%. I mention this one first because it's the single most common missed expense I come across, and almost nobody arrives at a first meeting already knowing about it.

Most of the expenses in this guide aren't exotic. They're ordinary costs that directors already pay, personally, out of already-taxed income, simply because nobody ever told them the company could pay instead. None of these will transform your tax bill on their own. Added together, across a full year, they genuinely do.

I've grouped twenty of them into six categories, roughly in order of how much they tend to save. If you've read our [allowable expenses guide](/blog/limited-company-allowable-expenses), think of this as the list of things that guide didn't have room for.

Costs From Before Your Company Even Existed

1. Pre-Trading and Pre-Incorporation Expenses

Here's one that genuinely surprises new directors. Costs you paid personally before your company started trading, provided they'd have been allowable if the company had paid them directly, can be claimed back once trading begins, and for up to seven years before that first day. Travel to set up the business, insurance, professional fees, and equipment bought in advance all qualify. The company simply reimburses you through your director's loan account, and the cost is treated as if it happened on day one of trading.

I've seen directors forget entirely that this applies, and personally absorb several hundred pounds of genuine start-up costs that their own company could have reimbursed, tax-free, months after incorporation. One client had spent nearly a year as a sole trader, paying for a website build, initial stock, and a batch of professional fees out of her own pocket before she finally incorporated. All of it was reclaimable once the company existed, and none of it had been logged anywhere. We spent an afternoon rebuilding a list from old bank statements and invoices, and the company ended up reimbursing just over £3,000, every penny of it tax-free to her and fully deductible for the company.

There is a limit worth knowing. HMRC generally treats pre-trading training as a capital cost, because it creates a new skill rather than maintaining one you already had, so a course taken before you started the business won't usually qualify in the same way as travel or equipment would. The seven-year window is generous, but it isn't unlimited in what it covers.

2. Incorporation Costs Themselves

The cost of setting up the company, including the Companies House fee, can usually be claimed as a pre-trading expense under the same rule. It's a small amount on its own, but it's one more thing worth capturing rather than letting it sit as a personal cost nobody ever reclaims.

Protecting Yourself and Your Income

3. Relevant Life Insurance

This is the one I opened with, and it's worth explaining properly. A Relevant Life policy is life insurance your company owns and pays the premiums for, covering you personally. The premiums are deductible against corporation tax, there's no income tax or National Insurance on the benefit, and the payout itself, usually written into a trust, is free of income tax, inheritance tax and capital gains tax. Compared with paying for an equivalent personal policy from your own after-tax, already-taxed income, the saving genuinely runs to 40 or 50%.

4. Income Protection Insurance

Alongside life cover, company-paid income protection can replace a portion of your income if you're unable to work through illness or injury. Treatment varies depending on how the policy is structured, so it's worth a proper conversation before setting one up, but for a director with no employer safety net behind them, it's a cost well worth exploring, particularly if your household genuinely depends on your income and there's no sick pay to fall back on if you were out of action for several months.

It's worth saying plainly why this matters so much to directors specifically. An employee elsewhere in the economy has statutory sick pay, and often a more generous employer scheme on top. As the director of your own company, that safety net largely doesn't exist unless you build it yourself. Income protection is one of the few ways to build it back in, and doing so through the company is considerably more efficient than paying for it personally.

5. Employer's Liability Insurance

If your company employs anyone, even part-time, this cover is a legal requirement, not an optional extra, and the premium is a straightforward allowable expense. I still occasionally meet a new employer who hasn't arranged it, usually because they assumed it was only relevant to larger businesses with a factory floor.

6. Professional Indemnity Run-Off Cover

If you're closing a company that provided professional advice or services, run-off cover protects you against claims arising after the business has stopped trading. It's a cost people associate with closing down rather than claiming, but where it's genuinely needed, it's an allowable expense for the company before it winds up, covered more fully in our [guide to closing a company](/blog/closing-limited-company-tax).

Professional Development and Knowledge

7. Professional Subscriptions on HMRC's List 3

Membership of a professional or trade body directly relevant to your work is deductible when the company pays for it. If the body appears on HMRC's List 3, the payment is also exempt from any benefit-in-kind charge, with no P11D needed at all. The list covers a huge range of bodies across law, accountancy, engineering, medicine, construction and beyond. If you've been quietly paying your own membership fee personally for years, it's worth checking whether your body is on the list before renewing it that way again.

8. Trade Journals and Publications

Subscriptions to industry publications, trade journals, and relevant online resources genuinely used for the business are allowable in the same way as any other professional cost. It's a small one, but it adds up if you subscribe to several.

9. Eye Tests and Glasses for Screen Work

If your role involves regular use of a computer screen, your company can pay for an eye test under workplace health and safety rules, and, where the test shows you need glasses specifically for screen work, the cost of basic corrective lenses too. This gets missed constantly, partly because it feels more like a health cost than a business one, and partly because most directors simply don't know the rule exists. It sits in an unusual middle ground: not quite a benefit in kind in the way private medical cover is, but not an ordinary office cost either, which is probably why it falls between the cracks so often.

Everyday Costs That Get Missed

10. Bank Charges and Interest

Business bank account fees, and interest on a business loan or overdraft taken out for genuine company purposes, are allowable costs. I occasionally see these sitting unclaimed because they're small, recurring, and easy to overlook against a backdrop of bigger invoices.

11. Credit and Debit Card Processing Fees

If your company takes card payments, the processing fees charged by your provider are a straightforward cost of doing business, fully allowable. For a company doing a reasonable volume of card transactions, these fees can add up to a meaningful sum across a year, and because they're usually deducted automatically before the money ever reaches your bank balance, they're one of the easiest costs to lose track of entirely.

12. Postage and Courier Costs

Stamps, parcels, and courier charges for sending anything genuinely business-related are allowable, down to the smallest amount. It's rarely a large claim individually, but it's one of those categories that quietly disappears if nobody logs it consistently.

13. Storage Costs, Physical and Cloud

Whether it's a self-storage unit for stock and equipment or a cloud storage subscription for files and backups, storage genuinely used for the business is an allowable cost. I've met directors paying for cloud storage personally, on a card they'd stopped thinking of as "the business one," for years, usually because the subscription was set up in a hurry before the company account even existed, and simply never got moved.

Technology and Marketing You Already Pay For

14. Website Hosting and Domain Renewals

Hosting fees and the annual renewal of your domain name are allowable business costs, yet they're exactly the kind of small, automatically-renewing charge that slips onto a personal card during setup and never gets moved across to the company account afterwards.

15. Software Subscriptions You Forgot You Had

Accounting software, design tools, project management platforms, and countless small SaaS subscriptions are allowable where they're used for the business. The trap here isn't whether they qualify, it's whether anyone remembers they exist. A subscription set up two years ago on a personal card, still being paid for personally out of habit, is a cost the company should have been covering the whole time.

16. Recruitment and Job Advertising Costs

Job board listings, recruitment agency fees, and the cost of advertising a vacancy are all allowable. For a growing company making its first hire, this is one worth flagging early, because recruitment costs can be substantial and are sometimes paid from a director's personal funds simply because the company card wasn't to hand at the time. I've seen a director pay a recruitment agency's invoice from a personal account during a particularly chaotic hiring push, fully intending to reclaim it, and then simply forget, because nothing about the payment flagged it as outstanding once the new hire started and life moved on.

Thanking People the Right Way

17. Branded Gifts to Clients Under £50

Ordinary gifts to clients, a bottle of wine, a hamper, a gift voucher, are treated like client entertaining and disallowed. But there's a specific exception. A gift costing £50 or less per person per tax year, carrying a clear advert for your business, and not consisting of food, drink or tobacco, is allowable. Branded diaries, pens, or small promotional items that meet those conditions genuinely work. Go even a penny over £50, and HMRC disallows the whole amount, not just the excess, so it's worth keeping a simple running log if you send gifts to the same client more than once in a year.

18. Small Gifts to Staff

Gifts to your own staff, including yourself as a director, are treated differently from client gifts. Provided a gift stays under £50 and isn't cash or a reward tied to performance, it can usually be given tax-free under the trivial benefits rules, within the £300 annual cap that applies specifically to directors of close companies. A small thank-you after a good project, kept within that limit, costs considerably less than people assume, and it's a genuinely tax-free way to mark an achievement rather than routing everything through salary or a dividend, which both attract tax before a penny of the gift is actually received.

19. Charitable Donations

A limited company can claim corporation tax relief on donations to charity, including cash, equipment, or trading stock. It's a different exception from the gift rules above, specifically carved out for genuine charitable giving, and it's worth remembering if your company supports a cause through the year rather than assuming any donation falls under the same disallowed category as client gifts.

Getting to Work

20. The Cycle to Work Scheme

If you cycle, even occasionally, for commuting or business travel, your company can provide a bicycle and safety equipment through a Cycle to Work arrangement, with genuine tax and National Insurance savings for both you and the company. There's no fixed value limit on the scheme itself, though the bike needs to be used mainly for qualifying journeys. For a director who cycles into the office even a few days a week, it's a cost worth setting up properly rather than quietly buying a bike personally and never mentioning it.

Why These Twenty Keep Getting Missed

Looking back over this list, a pattern runs through almost every item. None of them are complicated once you know they exist. All of them are easy to miss precisely because they don't look like "business expenses" in the way office rent or a laptop does. A pair of glasses feels personal. A bike feels personal. A life insurance premium feels deeply personal. That's exactly why they slip through, paid quietly from a personal account out of habit, year after year, while the company that could have paid for them, and claimed the tax relief for doing so, sits unaware.

The fix isn't complicated either. Once or twice a year, it's worth going through a list like this one with fresh eyes, checking what's currently being paid personally that genuinely belongs on the company card instead. For a growing business, that review tends to turn up more than people expect.

A Simple Way to Catch These Going Forward

Rather than relying on memory, the directors who capture the most tend to do two things consistently. First, they move recurring costs, hosting, software, professional subscriptions, storage, onto the company card the moment they're identified, rather than leaving them on a personal one "for now" and meaning to switch later. Second, they keep a short running note of anything paid personally for the business during the year, even small amounts, so nothing has to be reconstructed from memory months afterwards.

It's worth treating this list as a prompt rather than a one-off checklist. New costs appear as a business grows, a new subscription here, a new insurance need there, and the same blind spot that let the first twenty slip through personal spending will happily let a twenty-first and twenty-second do the same, unless there's a habit in place to catch them.

If you'd like us to go through your own setup and flag anything on this list that applies to you, get in touch with the team at Cannon Accountants. It's a short conversation, and for several of these, particularly the Relevant Life policy, it can be worth hundreds of pounds a year from a single phone call.

For the wider picture of allowable expenses, benefits in kind, and everything else covered in this series, head back to our complete Limited Company Tax Guide 2026/27: Corporation Tax, Dividends & Director Tax →.

Disclaimer:

The content of this blog is for general informational purposes only and should not be considered professional tax advice. The information is correct at the time of publishing but may change following future UK budget announcements or updates to HMRC guidance. Individual circumstances vary, and tax obligations can differ based on your personal situation. We strongly recommend consulting with us or a qualified tax professional to receive advice tailored to your specific needs.