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Guideby Gair

Free Mileage Tracker UK: A Buyer's Guide for 2026

Search "free mileage tracker UK" on the App Store and you'll find a dozen apps with the word "free" in the title. Install three of them and you'll discover the catch within five minutes:

  • App A: free for 14 days, then £9.99/month
  • App B: free to install, but limited to 30 trips a month (you can hit that in a week)
  • App C: free to track, but the export and the actual HMRC rate calculation are behind the paywall

None of these are really free. They're trial-ware. This guide walks through what a genuinely free UK mileage tracker should include - and where the real costs in a tracking app actually live, so you can spot the bait-and-switch before you install.

What "free" should mean

A genuinely free UK mileage tracker should give you:

  • Unlimited trips. No monthly cap, no annual cap. You should be able to track 50,000 miles a year if your work demands it.
  • Background GPS tracking. The trip should record automatically without you having to remember to open the app.
  • HMRC AMAP rates calculated automatically. The 45p/25p/24p calculation with the 10,000-mile threshold applied per UK tax year - this is the core value of any UK mileage tracker. If it's behind the paywall, the rest of the app is decoration.
  • Business / personal classification. A tap to mark each trip business or personal, with the option to auto-classify by saved location or work schedule.
  • UK tax year baked in. 6 April to 5 April, not the calendar year. Apps built for the US use 1 January and will report your numbers wrong.
  • No ads. Ads in a tax app are a privacy red flag - they often mean your trip data is being sold.

What's reasonable to gate behind a paywall:

  • The Self Assessment PDF export (PDF generation has real per-document cost)
  • CSV bulk export
  • Open Banking integration (Plaid / TrueLayer APIs charge per user per month)
  • Multi-month analytics dashboards (heavy database queries)
  • Accountant sharing (extra infrastructure)
  • Unlimited vehicles + saved locations (storage scales with usage)

What is not reasonable to gate:

  • Recording a trip
  • Calculating the HMRC deduction
  • Classifying a trip as business or personal
  • Viewing your own tax-year total on screen
  • Receiving the AMAP rate applied to your vehicle

The first list is "the cost of the developer running the app". The second list is "what every user needs to participate in the tax system at all". Gating the second list is the bait-and-switch pattern.

Red flags to watch for

  • "Free trial". If the App Store listing mentions "free trial" anywhere, the app is paid. The trial just delays the bill.
  • Trip caps. 30 trips a month sounds generous until you do a Deliveroo shift with 12 orders before lunch.
  • Paywalled exports. If you can record trips but can't see the tax-year total or the AMAP calculation, the app is useless for its stated purpose.
  • "Upgrade to see your data". If you have to pay to see what you tracked, run.
  • Ads inside a tax app. Where do you think the ad money comes from?
  • Built for the IRS. Apps using "cents per mile" and "tax year starts January" are American. They'll calculate your numbers using the wrong rate and the wrong year boundaries.

Why "free" works as a business model for some apps

A free tier funded by a paid tier is sustainable for one reason: the paid features have real per-user costs the free features don't. PDF generation, banking API fees, multi-month analytics queries - these all scale with use. Pro-tier users genuinely pay for those features.

What doesn't have real per-user cost: storing a few GPS coordinates per trip, applying a rate calculation, showing you your total on screen. That's the part that should be free, and the part the bait-and-switch apps gate.

MileClear's free tier

MileClear's free tier includes:

  • Unlimited GPS-tracked trips (no monthly cap, no annual cap)
  • Business / personal classification
  • HMRC 45p/25p/24p rate calculation with the 10,000-mile threshold
  • UK tax year baked in (6 April to 5 April)
  • Platform tagging for gig drivers (Uber, Deliveroo, Just Eat, Amazon Flex, DPD, Evri, etc.)
  • 1 vehicle with DVLA registration lookup
  • Fuel logging + live UK prices from 8,300+ stations
  • All 18 achievements + streaks + personal records
  • Daily, weekly, monthly, yearly recaps
  • 2 saved locations with geofencing
  • Tax Readiness card (running tax-year summary)
  • Self Assessment wizard view (shows what each SA103 box should contain)
  • Activity heatmap + anonymous benchmarking
  • MOT + tax expiry reminders
  • Manual expense tracking (15 SA103-mapped categories)
  • Push notifications, profile, feedback voting

Pro (£4.99/month or £44.99/year) covers:

  • Printable Self Assessment PDF export
  • CSV export + import
  • Open Banking earnings sync
  • Auto-Classify Rules
  • Business Insights (£/mile, £/hour, platform comparison)
  • Multi-month analytics
  • Pickup Wait community insights
  • Accountant sharing
  • Journey Map (full-route visualisation)
  • Unlimited vehicles + saved locations

There are no ads. There will never be ads. The free tier is paid for by the people who choose Pro.

The bottom line

A genuinely free UK mileage tracker should let you record trips, classify them, see the HMRC calculation and see your tax-year total - all without paying anything. If an app gates any of those four things, it's not free, it's a trial in disguise.

Want to try the genuinely free version? Install MileClear on the App Store.