The UK Work Tie

Most of the UK Statutory Residence Test comes down to a question anyone can answer with a calendar: how many days were you physically in the UK? The work tie is different. It doesn't ask where you were. It asks what you were doing while you were there — and that distinction creates a genuine evidence problem that catches even careful, well-advised people off guard.

If you're a company director, consultant, or globally mobile executive claiming non-UK residence while still occasionally working in the UK, the work tie deserves more attention than it usually gets. Unlike day-counting, it can't be solved with a tracking app alone.

The Legal Rule: Schedule 45, Finance Act 2013

The work tie is one of five UK ties considered under the sufficient ties test. Under Schedule 45 of the Finance Act 2013, an individual has a work tie for a tax year if they work in the UK for at least 40 days, whether continuously or intermittently. Crucially, a "work day" is separately defined: a person works in the UK for a day if they do more than 3 hours of work in the UK on that day.

"Work" is interpreted broadly. It includes not just billable client work, but director duties, attending or dialing into board meetings, and reviewing or responding to emails. Travel undertaken in connection with duties can also count.

Why This Tie Is Different From Every Other SRT Test

The 90-day tie, the country tie, and the underlying UK day count are all, at their core, questions of physical presence. Was your phone, your body, in the UK at midnight or not? Those questions can be answered objectively by a location record.

The work tie cannot. It asks whether more than 3 hours of work occurred on a given day — an activity and intent question, not a location question. Someone can be in the UK for ten hours and do zero hours of qualifying work, triggering nothing. Someone else can work for 3.5 hours from a hotel room with no UK accommodation tie in play at all, and trigger a work day that counts toward the 40-day threshold. No GPS coordinate, and no location-tracking product on the market — including ours — can tell the difference between those two people just from where their device was.

What HMRC Actually Expects as Evidence

This is where the picture gets more manageable than it first appears. HMRC's own internal guidance on record-keeping for the Statutory Residence Test sets out, in plain terms, what it expects individuals to keep. Per HMRC's Residence and FIG Regime Manual (RFIG21930), individuals relying on the work-related tests should retain records showing the nature and duration of their work activities — described as most usefully captured in a work diary, calendar, or timesheet, noting hours worked and the nature of that work, such as emails, meetings, or travel claims.

Notice what's absent from that list: device telemetry, GPS logs, or anything captured automatically. HMRC's expectation is a self-maintained, contemporaneous record, ideally corroborated by secondary evidence — calendar invites showing meeting start and end times, email timestamps, employer confirmation letters, travel documents, and meeting minutes. The standard applied is a reasonable, good-faith estimate, not forensic, minute-by-minute precision.

Why Some Professionals Are Naturally Better Protected

Lawyers, consultants, and other professionals who bill by the hour already have a byproduct of their business model that solves most of this problem: granular, contemporaneous timesheets, often broken into six-minute increments, created because that's how they get paid. That paper trail exists whether or not they ever think about the SRT.

Company directors face a different, sharper exposure point. Flying in for UK board meetings, or making key decisions from a UK location, counts as work if it exceeds three hours — some advisors recommend keeping such meetings under three hours, or attending virtually from outside the UK, specifically to avoid triggering a work day. Remote and hybrid professionals without a natural timesheet system are typically the least prepared and most exposed group, simply because nothing in their normal routine creates the record HMRC is asking for.

What Location Tracking Can — and Can't — Do For You

To be direct about where a tool like Domicile365 genuinely helps, and where it doesn't: our location log, taken every 15 minutes on our Windows and Mac desktop apps, produces a precise, near-continuous presence record. That's real, objective value for the 90-day tie, the country tie, and the underlying UK day count, all of which are presence questions.

Applied to the work tie, that same location precision has a narrower but still meaningful role: corroboration. If you log in your own diary that you worked from 9am to 1pm on a given day, and an independent, contemporaneous location record shows continuous presence at a consistent location across exactly that window, you've closed a real gap — the gap between a memory reconstructed years later during an HMRC enquiry, and a record that was never in dispute in the first place. What it cannot do, on its own or in combination with any location data, is establish that the hours in question were actually spent working rather than on anything else. That fact still requires your own contemporaneous account.

Building Your Own Work-Tie Defense File

If you have any UK work exposure while claiming non-UK residence, a simple, disciplined record-keeping habit is worth more than any single piece of software. Consider:

1. Keep a same-day diary. Note hours worked and the nature of the work, on the day it happens, not reconstructed weeks or years later.
2. Save calendar invites with times. Meeting invitations showing scheduled start and end times are exactly the kind of corroboration HMRC's own guidance references.
3. Retain travel and access records. Boarding passes, hotel receipts, and building access logs help corroborate where you were on days in question.
4. Cross-reference your location history. Use a precise day-by-day location record to confirm you were where you say you were during the hours you've logged.
5. Sync existing timesheets if you have them. If you already track billable time for client or employer purposes, that record is often your strongest evidence — don't let it go unused for SRT purposes just because it was built for another reason.

How Domicile365 Fits Into This

Domicile365 was built to solve the presence problem precisely: automatic, tamper-resistant location tracking every 15 minutes across our iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac apps, giving you a defensible day-by-day record for the 90-day tie, the country tie, and your underlying UK presence count. Paired with your own work diary for the days you're doing UK-based work, it becomes a strong corroborating layer for your complete record — exactly the kind of supporting evidence HMRC's own guidance points toward.