Unclaimed Capital Allowances in the UK: How to Recover the Tax Relief Hiding in Your Property

In plain English: unclaimed capital allowances are tax relief on qualifying items within a commercial building, owned, leased, or fitted out by a business, that has never been identified or claimed, usually because no specialist survey was ever carried out to find them.

Three categories get missed most often. Property embedded fixtures and fittings (PEFFs) are items that came with the building when it was bought but were never separately identified and valued at the point of purchase, wiring, sanitaryware, hotel kitchen equipment, care home nurse call systems. Integral features, a defined category under the Capital Allowances Act 2001, cover electrical and lighting systems, cold water systems, heating and air conditioning, lifts and escalators. Refurbishment and fit-out items are qualifying assets installed during renovation or extension works, often coded as generic “building costs” in the accounts rather than broken down by asset type.

None of this shows up in standard accounting records, because accounts record what was paid and when, not a breakdown of a £2 million purchase price into land, structure, and the hundreds of individual qualifying assets embedded within it. That breakdown requires a dedicated capital allowances survey, carried out by people trained to know exactly what to look for. Our article on how to uncover hidden tax relief in commercial property purchases goes into more depth on how this plays out at acquisition.

As a general guide: offices typically see 15-25% of purchase price identified as qualifying expenditure, industrial units 10-20%, and retail premises around 10-15%. Hotels, and care homes, tend to sit higher, often 25-35%, reflecting the volume of catering, nurse call, and mechanical or electrical installations. Mixed-use and heavily refurbished buildings vary widely depending on the scope of works carried out.

To make this concrete: take a £1.5 million office building bought eight years ago, never surveyed for capital allowances. A typical review might identify around 20% of the purchase price, roughly £300,000, as qualifying expenditure across lighting, heating, lifts, and embedded fixtures like sanitaryware and fitted furniture. Depending on the owner’s tax position, that could translate into a saving in the region of £57,000 to £75,000, recoverable from a building already owned, without any change to how it’s used day to day.

These are drawn from our own published case studies.

For Majesticare (Evesham) Ltd, a £5.3 million care home build with spend spanning 2016 to 2021, a full survey identified £2,334,196 in qualifying expenditure, a 44% claim rate, once items like the sprinkler system, dado trunking, and wet rooms were properly valued.

A warehouse and metal recycling facility, built in phases between 2019 and 2023, held £489,747 in qualifying plant, including high-bay LED lighting and electrical switchgear, plus a further £330,969 in tax savings unlocked once the Structures and Buildings Allowance was correctly applied.

At a Michelin-starred London restaurant, a £1.86 million refurbishment and fit-out identified £918,325 in qualifying expenditure, around 49% of cost, spanning bespoke bar fittings, an air extraction system, and a dumbwaiter lift.

Perhaps the clearest illustration of how far a retrospective claim can reach: an aparthotel refurbishment carried out between 2014 and 2016 wasn’t reviewed until 2025, nearly a decade later, yet still yielded £709,120 in qualifying expenditure, including a passenger lift and water tank booster system, and £179,301 in projected tax savings. In every case, the value had been sitting in the building for years, untouched until a dedicated survey went looking for it.

An overwhelming number of UK commercial property owners, leaseholders, and operators have something here: unclaimed capital allowances quietly sitting inside a building they already use to trade. Given how common this is, the only sensible next step is to actually find out, rather than continuing to guess.

Use our claims calculator to see whether it’s worth a closer look.

You can also explore unlocking hidden cash in your property and claiming allowances on hidden PEFFs in older buildings. The downside of looking is zero; the upside, for most UK commercial properties, is substantial.