Expenses and benefits: sporting or recreational facilities

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1. Overview

As an employer paying for sporting or recreational facilities for your employees, you have certain tax, National Insurance and reporting obligations.

What鈥檚 included

This includes:

  • sporting or recreational facilities that you provide directly, such as a gym
  • vouchers that can be exchanged for the use of sporting or recreational facilities

2. What's exempt

You will not have to report anything to HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) or pay tax and National Insurance if the facilities:

  • are available for use by all of your employees
  • are not available to the general public
  • are used mainly by employees, former employees or members of employees鈥� families and households (employees of any companies you鈥檝e grouped together with to provide the facilities also count)
  • are somewhere that is not a private home, holiday or other overnight accommodation (including any associated sporting facilities)
  • do not involve the use of a mechanically propelled vehicle (including road vehicles, boats and aircraft).

Salary sacrifice arrangements

You do have to report how much sporting or recreational facilities are worth to each employee if they are a part of a salary sacrifice arrangement.

3. What to report and pay

If the facilities you provide are not exempt, you鈥檒l need to:

  • report the cost on form P11D for each employee using the facilities
  • pay Class 1A National Insurance on the value of the benefit - this is normally the cost to you of providing the facilities, but contact HMRC if there is not a simple way of working this out

Salary sacrifice arrangements

If the value of the benefit is less than the amount of salary given up, report the salary amount instead.

These rules do not apply to arrangements made before 6 April 2017 - check when the rules will change.

4. Technical guidance

The following guides contain more detailed information: