THOMTAX

Capital allowances on holiday lets

This is the one property type where the honest answer starts with a warning rather than an opportunity. The rules changed, and a lot of what was written about holiday lets before 2025 is now out of date.

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Furnished holiday lettings used to sit in a favourable position: treated in several respects like a trade, which opened up plant and machinery allowances on the contents and fixtures of the property in a way that ordinary residential letting does not. That special regime was abolished with effect from April 2025. Plant in a dwelling-house is generally excluded from plant and machinery allowances, so the question of whether a given property is a dwelling now matters a great deal more than it used to.

What qualifies in holiday lets

Expenditure in earlier periods
Allowances properly claimed under the previous regime are not retrospectively removed. What changes is the treatment going forward.
Communal and non-dwelling areas
Reception, offices, plant rooms and shared facilities on a larger site are not the dwelling itself.
Site infrastructure
On a park or multi-unit site, the services, roads, lighting and shared plant sit outside any individual dwelling.
Genuinely commercial accommodation
Where accommodation is run as a hotel or aparthotel rather than as dwellings, the analysis is different.

Not an exhaustive list, and not every item applies to every building. What counts in your case is established by survey, not from a page.

Whether it is a dwelling is now the whole question

Plant and machinery allowances are not available for plant installed in a dwelling-house. Under the old furnished holiday lettings regime that mattered less. Now it is the first thing to establish. A single holiday cottage and a forty-unit holiday park with a reception building, a pool block and site infrastructure are very different propositions, and the second one usually still has a claim worth investigating even though the first may not.

Which of these is you

You own a single holiday cottage

Be sceptical of anyone promising a large claim. The dwelling exclusion is the obstacle and it needs answering honestly before anything else.

You run a holiday park or multi-unit site

The shared buildings, plant and site infrastructure are not dwellings, and that is usually where the claim is.

You operate serviced accommodation or an aparthotel

Worth establishing where on the spectrum between hotel and dwelling the operation actually sits, because the answer drives everything.

You claimed under the old regime

Earlier claims stand. What needs care is how the position is carried forward after the regime ended.

Questions we get about holiday lets

I read that holiday lets get generous capital allowances.

That was accurate before April 2025 and is now out of date. A lot of material online has not been updated. We would rather tell you that than sell you an expectation that has since been withdrawn.

Does that mean there is nothing here at all?

Not necessarily, and it depends on what you own. A single cottage is a hard case. A site with communal buildings, a pool block, a reception and infrastructure is a much more promising one because those parts are not dwellings.

What about work I did in 2022?

Allowances properly claimed for earlier periods are not undone. The change affects the treatment going forward rather than rewriting history.

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