Claiming Personal Hygiene Products as a Fitness Professional

As a Fitness Professional (Personal Trainer, Fitness Presenter etc) you will sweat more for than the average person for the purpose of your business, which in-turn means you will be buying more personal hygiene products than normal and therefore you can claim for these additional personal hygiene products – happy days! However there is an exact method in which you need to do this.

How to Claim for Personal Hygiene Products as a Fitness Professional

This method simply involves buying two lots of hygiene products, one for personal use and one for business use. Now this is going to sound really ‘OCD’ but you must only use your personal hygiene products for your own use when not performing any tasks associated with your business and only use your business hygiene products before or after performing work duties. If you do this then can claim 100% of the hygiene products bought for your business becuase you are ONLY using them for the purpose of your business, making that expense ‘wholly and exclusively’ for your business. It’s that simple!

The reason you have to be so precise is because of something the HMRC call ‘Duality of Purpose’ which means you are trying to claim a business expense which gains you some personal benefit. In this case the HMRC only allow you to claim the percentage of use for business and with something as trivial as personal hygiene products it would be impossible to work out “how many times you squeezed a drop of shampoo from the bottle for the purpose of your business” (for example!). Therefore if you have hygiene products that are ONLY used for business then you can claim 100% of those costs without fear of reprisal from the HMRC.

So to conclude, just remember to have one set of hygiene products for business which you use to wash with after you’ve done your fitness presenting etc and another seperate set of hygiene products which you only use for personal cleanliness then you’re completely safe to claim the business hygiene products.