Posted February 7, 2020

Claiming expenses on a garden office

Sean Rushton, Whitesides Accountant sheds (no pun intended) some light on claiming expenses on a garden office.

If you’ve constructed a garden office for work you can claim the costs of the construction as capital allowances. However, if you’ve claimed capital allowances on it you may not be able to claim full principal private residence relief on the sale of your property.

Normally this relief means that you don’t pay capital gains tax on selling your main residence, however in this case because part of your home will have been used exclusively for business then when you sell your house, for more than it costs to buy it, some of that gain will be subject to capital gains tax.

Once you’ve discussed the implications of the loss of private property relief with your accountant and decided to go ahead with the office, then any costs relating to the furnishing of the garden office, for example, a desk, a computer, filing cabinet would be capital expenditure. Which would be able to be reclaimed as capital allowances. In most cases, you should be able to claim full annual investment allowance in the year that the expense is incurred.