Capital Allowances for Care Homes: What a Commercial Buyer Can Claim

Care homes sit at the higher end of the capital allowances scale. Where a bare warehouse might hold single figures of claimable value as a share of its price, a working care home typically holds 25% to 35% of its purchase price or fit-out cost in qualifying fixtures. The reason is simple: a care home is a densely serviced building. It is full of the functional plant needed to house, move, wash, feed and safeguard vulnerable residents, and almost all of that plant qualifies for plant and machinery allowances.

This is the property-side, commercial-buyer view of the topic. It is written for the person or company that owns or is buying the care home as a property asset and wants to know what the embedded fixtures are worth and how to keep the entitlement. It is not a guide to running a care home. For the care-operator perspective, including the wider trading and sector-specific tax position, the specialist site Care Home Tax covers that ground and already ranks for care-sector allowances. The two views are complementary: this page is about the fixtures claim on the building, that site is about the operating business.

Why care homes hold significant unclaimed capital allowances

Most of the value of a commercial building is in its structure, which does not qualify for plant and machinery allowances. What lifts a care home above the average is the sheer volume of functional plant bolted into that structure. Every bedroom has a nurse-call point. Bathrooms carry assisted bathing equipment and hoisting. Corridors run ceiling-track hoist rails. Behind the scenes there is a commercial kitchen, an industrial laundry, sluice rooms, a standby generator and often a sprinkler system. None of that is on the sales particulars, and none of it appears as a separate line on a purchase contract, which is exactly why so much of it goes unclaimed.

Two groups of owners routinely miss the claim. Buyers of second-hand homes, because the fixtures are wrapped inside a single purchase price and no one apportions them. And operators who built or extended a home, because the construction cost was booked as one capital figure rather than split between structure, integral features and plant. In both cases the allowances are sitting in the building, unclaimed, until a specialist survey separates them out. There is no time limit on a first claim for fixtures you still own, so a home bought or built several years ago can still be surveyed and the pool brought into a current tax return.

The care-specific plant that drives a claim

Every sector has its own signature fixtures. For a care home, the items that dominate a claim, and that a general review tends to miss, are:

• Nurse-call systems. The call points, wiring, panels and monitoring that run through every room. Functional plant, and because it is repeated across the whole home, a meaningful value on its own.
• Ceiling-track and mobile hoists. Fixed overhead hoist rails in bedrooms and bathrooms, plus mobile and gantry hoists. All plant used to deliver care.
• Assisted and Parker baths. Height-adjustable, walk-in and reclining bathing equipment, repeated across many bathrooms, together with the associated hot water and drainage serving them.
• Passenger and bed lifts. Lifts sized to move beds and wheelchairs between floors. Lifts are integral features and go into the special rate pool.
• Sluice rooms. Bedpan washers, macerators and disposal units. Heavily plumbed service rooms that are easy to overlook and clearly functional plant.
• Commercial laundry and kitchen. Industrial washers, dryers, ironers, walk-in refrigeration, ranges and extraction. Catering and laundering for a full home is an industrial-scale installation.
• Standby generators. Back-up power for a building whose residents cannot be left without heating, lighting or medical equipment. Plant and machinery.
• Sprinklers and fire suppression. Increasingly standard in care settings and qualifying as plant.
• Sanitaryware. WCs, wash basins, wet-room and assisted-bathroom fittings, repeated in volume across residents' rooms and communal facilities.

Alongside these care-specific items sit the ordinary building services that qualify in any commercial property: the electrical system, cold water system, space and water heating, and powered ventilation and air cooling. Those are integral features under section 33A of the Capital Allowances Act 2001. If you want the full statutory mechanics of what counts as an integral feature and how the categories are defined, our integral features capital allowances guide covers section 33A in detail. This page stays on the applied, commercial-buyer question of what a care home in particular is worth.

What a typical care home claim is worth

Take a mid-sized home bought for £2,500,000. At the middle of the sector range, around 30% of the price is claimable embedded fixtures, which points to a pool of roughly £750,000. The care-unique drivers, nurse-call, hoisting and assisted bathing repeated across every room, are a large part of why the figure lands this high rather than at the 10% to 15% you might see on a plainer building.

That £750,000 splits between two pools. Loose and functional plant, the hoists, nurse-call, assisted baths, laundry and kitchen equipment and the generator, generally goes into the main pool, written down at 14% a year from April 2026 (reduced from 18% by Finance Act 2026). The integral features, the electrical, heating, ventilation and cold water systems and the lifts, go into the special rate pool at 6% a year. But the writing-down rates only matter for expenditure that is not swept up by a first-year relief:

• The Annual Investment Allowance gives a 100% deduction on up to £1,000,000 of qualifying spend across either pool, and is available to companies, partnerships and individuals alike. On a £750,000 pool, the AIA alone can in principle cover the whole claim in a single year, subject to how much of the annual allowance is already used.
• Full expensing gives companies a 100% first-year deduction on new and unused main-rate plant, with a 50% first-year allowance on new special-rate items. This bites on fit-outs and new-build, where the plant is new, rather than on second-hand purchases.
• The new 40% first-year allowance, available from 1 January 2026 on new and unused main-rate plant, is open to both companies and unincorporated businesses and matters most to unincorporated operators whose spend runs above the £1,000,000 AIA cap.

For a company paying corporation tax at 25%, a £750,000 pool is worth around £187,500 in tax relief. Where the AIA or full expensing applies, most of that lands in year one; the balance is written down at 14% or 6% a year in the pools. The point of the arithmetic is not the exact figure, which a survey confirms, but the scale: on a single mid-sized home, the claim is comfortably into six figures.

Care plant is strong, defensible plant

The nuance that sets care homes apart is not a restriction, it is a strength. In some sectors the argument with HMRC is about how much of a building is genuinely plant rather than setting. In a care home, the care-specific fixtures are about as defensible as plant gets. A nurse-call system, a ceiling-track hoist, an assisted bath and a sluice-room macerator are not decorative and they are not part of the premises in a passive sense. They are the apparatus with which the care business is carried on. That functional character, the test that has run through the case law from the classic plant cases onward, is squarely met by care equipment.

That matters when you compare care homes with sectors where the claim is contested. Student accommodation runs into the dwelling-house restriction. A bare industrial unit is mostly structure. A care home, by contrast, is dense with equipment whose purpose is unambiguous, which is why the sector consistently produces claims at the upper end and why those claims stand up. The practical risk is not that the fixtures fail to qualify, it is that they are never identified, because they are buried in a single purchase price or construction figure.

Because a care home is both a property asset and a trading business, the tax picture has two halves. The fixtures claim on the building is the property-side question this page answers. The operating position, occupancy, fees, staffing, CQC and the economics of the care trade, belongs with care-sector specialists, and Care Home Tax is built around exactly that operator view. A capital allowances survey slots alongside that wider advice rather than replacing it.

Buying versus already owning a care home

The route to the claim depends on how you hold the property, and the difference is important.

If you already own the home, whether you bought it or built it, and no one has claimed the fixtures, you can make a first claim at any time. There is no deadline. A retrospective survey identifies the unclaimed pool and it is brought into your next return. This is the straightforward case.

If you are buying, the position is governed by the fixtures pooling requirement introduced in April 2014 and the section 198 election. In outline: where the seller could have claimed on the fixtures, they generally must have brought those fixtures into a capital allowances pool, and buyer and seller must jointly agree a section 198 election fixing the value that passes on the fixtures (HMRC sets out the fixtures and elections rules in its Capital Allowances Manual at CA26470). Get this right and the value transfers cleanly. Get it wrong, or ignore it, and the buyer can lose the right to claim on the fixtures altogether. A £1 election, agreed without advice, can hand the whole entitlement away.

The lesson for a care home buyer is to treat capital allowances as a conveyancing issue, not an afterthought. The fixtures position should be raised in the heads of terms, the seller's claim history established during due diligence, and the election negotiated before exchange. This is the same due-diligence discipline that applies to any commercial purchase; our guide to embedded capital allowances on commercial property works through the election trap and the pooling requirement in full, and it is the hub for the sector-by-sector view this page is part of.

How a specialist survey works, and what it costs

Valuing embedded fixtures is surveyor work, not accountancy. The apportionment of a purchase price between structure, integral features and plant has to be done on a just and reasonable basis under section 562 of the Capital Allowances Act 2001, and that means a site survey and a valuation, not a percentage guessed from a spreadsheet. A specialist firm sends a surveyor to the home, itemises the qualifying fixtures room by room, values them, and prepares the report and election paperwork that supports the claim if HMRC asks.

The commercial model is designed to be low-risk for the owner. Specialist capital allowances firms typically work on a no-win, no-fee or contingent basis, so the initial feasibility review costs you nothing and the fee is a share of the relief actually identified. If there is nothing to claim, there is nothing to pay. A general accountant does not usually carry out this survey work, which is why so many claims are missed even when the owner has an accountant, and it is why care home enquiries here are routed to specialist, surveyor-led firms rather than a general practice.

To size a potential claim before you commission anything, you can run the numbers yourself. Our capital allowances calculator applies the sector range to your purchase price or fit-out cost and gives an indicative pool and tax saving, which is a useful reality check before a survey.

How care homes compare with other clinical and care property

Care homes are one of a family of health and care properties where the claim is driven by clinical and functional equipment rather than fit-out finishes. The pattern differs by sector. A GP surgery turns on who holds the claim, because the premises are often leased from a developer and held through a partnership, so the section 198 election at the grant of a lease becomes the decisive point. A dental practice is dominated by loose, movable equipment, chairs, imaging and autoclaves, most of which is main-pool plant eligible for the AIA or full expensing rather than special-rate integral features.

What care homes share with both is the underlying principle: the value is in the equipment that delivers the service, and that equipment qualifies. What sets care homes apart is the range of that equipment, from nurse-call and hoisting to laundry, kitchen, sluice and back-up power, and the volume in which it is repeated across a whole residential building. That combination is what lands the sector at the 25% to 35% end of the scale.