How to Claim Fuel in Singapore (2026 Guide)

Quick answer

Singapore is the exception among the five jurisdictions: fuel for a car is not deductible at all. The Income Tax Act prohibits expenses of S-plated private cars and Q-plated or RU-plated business cars (registered on or after 1 April 1998), business use or not, reimbursed or not. Fuel is deductible only for commercial vehicles: vans, lorries, goods vehicles, and motorcycles. The 9% GST on car petrol is equally blocked.

Is fuel tax deductible in Singapore?

For cars, no, and the rule is absolute rather than an apportionment question. Section 15 of the Income Tax Act denies deductions for motor car expenses ^{[1] [2]} (petrol, ERP, parking, insurance, repairs) for private cars and for business cars registered on or after 1 April 1998, even where every kilometre is business. The prohibition extends to reimbursements: a company refunding its director’s petrol has not converted the cost into a deductible one. This is deliberate policy, of a piece with COE economics: Singapore does not subsidise car ownership through the tax system.

Commercial vehicles live outside the prohibition ^[1] . Goods vehicles, vans, lorries, and motorcycles used in the business deduct fuel and running costs normally, at the business share. And a narrow class of cars escapes because the car is the business: private-hire cars rented to customers or used for chauffeured services, and driving-school cars, are deductible in the operator’s hands.

How much can you claim?

For a commercial vehicle, the business share of actual fuel spend. Worked example: a renovation contractor’s lorry and two vans burn S$14,500 of diesel in the year, wholly for site and delivery runs: fully deductible, with the 9% GST claimed as input tax. The director’s S-plate sedan burns S$3,800 of petrol, some of it driving between sites: deduction nil, GST claim nil.

Where staff use their own cars for business, the clean alternatives are deductible ones: public transport, taxi and ride-hail fares for business journeys, or a transport allowance treated as the employee’s taxable income.

GST on fuel

Regulation 27 blocks input tax on the cost and running expenses of motor cars ^[3] , so the GST in car petrol is unrecoverable regardless of use. Fuel for commercial vehicles carries claimable input tax in the ordinary way, from tax invoices, at the business proportion. The bookkeeping failure mode is a fuel account that mixes the van’s diesel with the director’s petrol; capture tools such as ExpenseFlow keep every fuel receipt attached to its transaction so the vehicle-by-vehicle split is enforceable at review, and the blocked portion stays out of the GST return.

Record-keeping requirements

Five years for the receipts, invoices, and the vehicle-by-vehicle allocation that shows which fuel belongs to deductible commercial vehicles and which to blocked cars. IRAS reviews of motor expenses are largely plate-type reviews: the records should make the split trivial to demonstrate.

How to claim, step by step

1. Split the fleet on paper: commercial vehicles (deductible) versus cars (blocked).
2. Capture fuel receipts tagged by vehicle, not in one undifferentiated fuel account.
3. Deduct the business share of commercial-vehicle fuel in the tax computation; add back every dollar of car fuel.
4. Claim input tax only on commercial-vehicle fuel, from tax invoices.
5. Route staff business travel through public transport, taxis, or allowances rather than car-expense reimbursements.
6. Keep records five years.

Common mistakes

• Claiming petrol for an S-plate car because the trips were business.
• Reimbursing a director’s car fuel and deducting it.
• Claiming the 9% GST on car petrol.
• One fuel account across cars and vans, making the add-back invisible.
• Assuming a Q-plate means deductible; post-1998 Q-plate cars are blocked too.

Software that helps

• Dext captures fuel receipts by photo and keeps each vehicle’s spend separately coded.
• ExpenseFlow reads fuel receipts, flags costs that identify a private passenger car (where Singapore blocks the deduction and the input tax), routes everything through review before it posts, and syncs coded transactions to Xero with the receipt attached, or to QuickBooks Online as a coded bill.
• Hubdoc collects fleet fuel-card statements monthly for the commercial vehicles that can claim.

FAQ

See the answered questions above for the car prohibition, commercial vehicles, GST, exceptions, and staff reimbursements.