AIBU to think if your boss wants you in the office, they should help pay to get you there?

What really pisses me off is that commuting costs are taxable. It’s bad enough having to pay commuting costs, but the fact that there are no tax breaks really annoys me. I have a remote contract right now, but to work from an office, I would need to earn another £10k to financially break even. £5k for the train pass, and another £5k for tax etc that I would need to pay for earning that extra £5k

Sometimes it does. However:
Work is a social construct;
An awful lot gets done informally at work, quick conversations, connecting, picking up atmosphere;
Informal training is easier, ditto coaching;
As a manager it is challenging to keep whole teams on side and together when everything is done on Teams
A significant minority sit on yellow and do no appear to be available;
A significant minority expect to combine it with collecting DC from school, and it isn't just a question of flexibility - if someone takes a late lunch - 3.15 to 4.15, that cuts out one hour slots from 2.30 to 4.30;

Separately wfh can be isolating; it is not good in home environnents where there is domestic abuse; and it can be difficult uf people live at close quarters.

I recall furlough paid 80% of salary, takung into account that it costs money to go to work.

Commuting - often to secure bigger houses and is a compromise, an employee choice. I always capped it at 45 minutes and when the DC were small, it was time v money, so I worked locally.

Where I worked problems arose when managers didn't lead from the front. Our pattern was 3 days in, 2 wfh. I had depts where hardly anyone was in because managers weren't. They became poorly performing services.

Hybrid is often non contractual and employees can legitimately be expected to go back to work.

who do you think pays NHS staff, teachers, police workers, shop workers etc to get to work? I find it incredibly entitled. I see it the other way - this has all happened since COVID. Effectively, people got a pay rise when working from home. Being expected to go into work is a bare minimum for a job IMO.

Many were given London Weighting or equivalent, which wasn’t taken away when WFH was prevalent.

It’s always been normal that people paid to get themselves to and from the workplace.

But you factor that in when you accept a job. You look at the commute cost and travel time.

My DH can work from home up to two days a week. But at the moment they need him in every day.so thats what he has to do.

Another friend has a WFH job but needs to go into London once a fortnight. Its expensive but she factored that in.

Unless a contract specifically says WFH every day the employees should have to go to the office if required.

How are the companies providing these “real jobs” funded? Do they need loans and bank accounts, by any chance, or are those fake too?

The UK banking sector contributed £43.3bn in total taxes for the financial year ending March 2025.

https://www.ukfinance.org.uk/system/files/2025-10/Total%20Tax%20Contribution%20of%20the%20UK%20banking%20sector%20and%20international%20tax%20comparison.PDF

If your role is home based this will be stated in your offer letter which you agree to when you accept the role. If you are not a homeworker, your office location should be specified. Your annual salary and hours are also detailed. It is up to the employee to ascertain whether the salary meets the demands of the hours/commute required. If it doesn't then the job is not for you. During Covid I would guess that not many companies officially changed their working requirements, so the original contracts still stands. Many companies now offer hybrid working which is a good compromise. Prior to covid, like millions of others, I had to be in the office 5 days a week, on time, and build in my commute and associated costs accordingly.

Don't really get it. Dr so obviously can't wfh. We get put in London during our training, not out of choice, they changed our reimbursements so we got crow fly mileage a day instead so about 87p towards our nearly 30/day ticket. 3h commute ontop of 13h days. V glad to have finished training.

Wish my partner had to go into the office more so dont have to listen to his teams calls on my days off and would save us a fortune on heating

This is a report from Price Waterhouse Cooper, one of the 'Big 4' who has global oversight of the banking sector. They did a grand job in 2007-2009.

"The 40 banks participating in this year’s study reported taxes borne of £16.0bn and taxes collected of £12.8bn, totalling a UK tax contribution of £28.8bn. Extrapolating from these figures,we estimate that the TTC for the entire UK banking sector is £43.3bn, which represents 4.3% of total UK government tax receipts in the year to 31 March 2025."

So they contribute less than alcohol, tobacco and fuel duties.

According to HMRC commuting costs to the employee's primary place of work is a non-allowable expense ie the employee cannot be reimbursed.

I am truly too Gen X for this nonsense. Just go to your damn job.

Whilst I do think - sadly - it's the employees cost to cover, can I just point out that I don't spend £58.20 a day on heating and electricity....

I do agree with this. If I could buy my train tickets before tax it would help me out a lot.

People should work out their costings before taking a job. If contracts change from WFH to having office days then people either accept it and pay their commute or look for work closer to home

Well yes - people expect companies to pay for them to live; by means of a salary. If the companies choose to keep salaries as low as they can for a very long period of time; eventually people will say ‘hang on, I haven’t got enough money to pay the train ticket / put petrol in my car - can you help more?’

Which is completely justified when the companies have decided to not pay their employees a reasonable wage and have chosen to pay huge huge amounts to the top people. The wealth gap is bigger than ever before - don’t be fooled into thinking ‘it’s a struggle for everyone’ - it absolutely isn’t. The money is there but it’s not going to the people who are working 9-5.

I agree about it being raised as an issue with the rail companies.

When I was part time, I had to pay for full price rail tickets. Being able to purchase a three travel days per week season ticket would have helped with the cost and saved the hassle of purchasing an ticket each day.

Since Covid the UK has not thrived.
It’s not bounced back like other countries have.
There have been a huge increase in employee entitlement (personal), employee rights (govt led), employment costs (tax), benefit claiming etc
The UK is really not a great place to operate a business from.
If things carry on, there will be significantly less private sector jobs in the UK.
Less jobs / businesses equals less tax to fund the public sector.

So it’s ok that I demand more and more flexibility from my employer - it’s good for my work /life balance and funds my lifestyle but I must remind myself that for the next generation, things will be very very different.

…… and that’s without the impact of AI!

Enlightenment with an employee. Since covid has gone through the roof it is honestly impossible for organisations to manage
I'm glad to see that the majority on the pole have said you are unreasonable
The cost of your commute is yours just in the same way the cost of the clothes you wear at work and the food you eat at work is yours.
When you accept a job at a particular location you accept that you have to do that commute and you'll have to pay for that commute. Post covid, those principles haven't changed anyone who accepts a job expecting that they wouldn't need to go into the office regularly when contacted at a particular office was naive. We were always going to return to some semblance of normality around workplace expectations it's actually taken longer than I thought it would.

I get it depends how hung up one is on staying employed.

I seem to be in the minority YANBU but people on mumsnet do love to wank off the capitalist machine.

If you can do your job effectively from home then commuting is a pay cut - current fuel prices are disgusting and our rail system is a disgrace.

Oh don’t be so ignorant - UK plc is powered by services. You know, the kind that dick about with spreadsheets and imaginary work.

Why is an increase in employee rights a bad thing?!

I guess at around the same time they've decided to move the goal posts on an employees work practices and create a new condition that creates extra expenses in order for them to do their job.
As PP said, if they had issued contracts that required office work then it's not their responsibility. But if the employee has a hybrid or home based contract, then there's a good argument to be made.
In a cost of living crisis, an employer who makes their employees poorer, even if they're legally entitled to, runs the risk if losing staff to a more flexible employer.

No employers should not pay people to go to work in the office.
Covid was the reason the whole WFH en masse happened. And after it people did not want tor return. Some companies sold off office space.
Some people WFH very well. Some do not do much work whatsoever.
Commuting is a pain. The issue is as someone’s very good thread says work is a social construct. There are benefits to being together face to face in person.

The issue for WFH is that you miss out on those, and that those who exploit it and do not work as they should become harder to manage.
Once that changes it might settle down.

In several European countries, it is common to receive a tax-free mileage allowance for commuting, calculated at a set rate per mile or kilometre between your home and office.

I agree that it is odd that in the UK you are just supposed to accept that you don't get this, given the low wages overall.