Think about how much of your business now runs through your home internet connection. Quotes are emailed. Invoices are sent online. Video calls replace meetings. Banking happens through apps. Even tradespeople who spend the whole day on site often run the business side from the sofa every evening.
Which raises an obvious question: can you claim broadband as a business expense? The answer is often yes — but not always in full.
The “Wholly and Exclusively” Rule Again
As with most expenses, HMRC’s starting point is whether the cost was incurred wholly and exclusively for business. A dedicated business-only connection is straightforward — the cost is generally claimable in full. The complication is that most households use one connection for work, streaming, shopping, gaming and family life all at once. In that situation, you can normally claim only the business proportion.
What Counts as Business Use?
Business use covers more than most people assume:
- emailing customers and suppliers
- online bookkeeping and accounting software
- cloud storage and backups
- video meetings
- ordering stock and materials
- submitting tax returns and quarterly MTD updates
The more your business genuinely depends on the internet, the easier it becomes to justify a meaningful business proportion.
Work It Out — Don’t Guess Wildly
There is no fixed percentage in the rules. What matters is that your estimate is reasonable and that you could explain the thinking behind it if asked — for example, basing it on how much of the connection’s use relates to work across a typical week. A considered estimate with a note of your reasoning beats both extremes: claiming everything, or claiming nothing.
The Familiar Mistake: Underclaiming
Just as with mobile phones, the most common error is not overclaiming — it is claiming nothing at all. Thousands of sole traders assume a household bill cannot be a business expense and quietly pay tax on profit they never really made. A fair business proportion of broadband is a perfectly legitimate claim.
The Bottom Line
Broadband is one of the most important tools a modern sole trader has. Most people cannot claim the full cost, but many are entitled to claim a fair business share of it — and over a year of bills, that adds up.
123Tax makes recurring costs like this easy to capture: log the expense once over WhatsApp and it is recorded, categorised and reflected in your records — so a legitimate claim never gets forgotten.