Car Leasing Guides

The guides library

Four guides, each written to answer one question properly rather than to skim several. They are deliberately not sales pages: there are no rates, no monthly figures and no offers in any of them, because the point is to help you reach a decision you can defend to your accountant. Start wherever your question sits.

Which guide should you read first?

Most people arrive with one of four questions. The table points each one at the right starting place, and in most cases one guide is enough rather than all four.

General guidance only. Tax treatment depends on individual circumstances and may change; always confirm your own position with your accountant.

The thread running through all four

If there is one idea worth taking from the library as a whole, it is that a car's emissions figure now drives almost every number that follows. Benefit-in-Kind is set by CO2, so the driver's personal tax bill follows emissions rather than list price. Corporation tax relief on lease rentals turns on the same 50g/km threshold. Capital allowances, if you buy instead, are banded by emissions too. A single certified figure on the V5C quietly determines the driver's tax, the company's relief and the resale risk.

That is why the guides keep returning to electric cars, and why our electric car leasing hub sits alongside them. At a 4% Benefit-in-Kind band against up to 37% for the highest-emission combustion cars, the gap is not a rounding difference; for a higher-rate taxpayer it is frequently the difference between tens of pounds a month and several hundred. The published rates rise only gradually, to 5% in 2027/28 and 7% in 2028/29, so the advantage is durable rather than a cliff edge. Plug-in hybrids are the exception worth watching, because their range-based banding ends from April 2028 and a four-year term signed today runs straight through that change.

The second thread is that the funding route changes the company's position but not the driver's. Benefit-in-Kind is calculated from P11D value and the emissions band whether the company owns the car outright or leases it. What leasing changes is the company's side of the ledger: relief arrives as rentals are paid rather than through a slow writing-down allowance, VAT on rentals is partly recoverable where VAT on a purchase generally is not, and the residual-value risk sits with the funder instead of your balance sheet.

What these guides deliberately do not do

You will not find a monthly figure, a headline rate or an offer anywhere in this library, and that is a deliberate editorial choice rather than an oversight. Lease pricing moves with funder appetite, manufacturer support, term, mileage and your own circumstances, so a number published in a guide is out of date almost immediately and tells you very little about what you would actually pay. Worse, a payment illustration sitting inside an explanatory article invites you to compare the wrong things.

Nor are these guides tax advice. They set out published HMRC rates and worked examples using them, which is a different thing from advice on your position. Your income mix, your company's profitability, your VAT status and your replacement cycle all change the answer, and your accountant is the right person to weigh them. Where a guide reaches a conclusion, it says what the conclusion rests on so you can test it rather than take it on trust.

What they do instead is show the mechanism. Once you can see how a Benefit-in-Kind percentage becomes a monthly tax figure, or how rental relief compares with a writing-down allowance over four years, you can run your own numbers on any car you like and interrogate any quotation you are given, including ours.

How we use these guides with customers

Intelligent Vehicle Finance is a phone-first, FCA-authorised leasing broker and a BVRLA member, working with directors, personal service companies, SMEs and private drivers across the UK. These guides exist because the same questions come up on almost every first call, and it is a better use of that call to discuss your situation than to explain Benefit-in-Kind from scratch. Customers who have read the relevant guide tend to ask sharper questions, and the conversation gets to a decision faster.

In practice we start with how the car will actually be used: company or personal, business or private mileage, the term that fits your replacement cycle, and whether charging at home or work is realistic if an electric car is on the table. From there we check availability and terms across a panel of funders and put written options in front of you, laid out clearly enough to set against a purchase quotation or a rival broker's proposal on the same assumptions. We are a credit broker, not a lender, and we may receive a commission from lenders for introducing customers to them. All agreements are subject to status.

Intelligent Vehicle Finance is also part of Global Vehicle Group, whose brands have funded more than 70,000 vehicles - so behind the personal service sits genuine group scale. If you would rather talk it through than read further, call 01752 429950 or request a callback. There is no cost and no obligation to get a quote, whether you are looking at Business Contract Hire, Personal Contract Hire or simply weighing up the range of cars we can source.

Guides FAQs