Cleaner car and travel: driving between sites

Cleaning is a job you drive to do. An office block before it opens, a medical centre at lunch, a couple of shops after they close, then a supply run for more chemicals in between. All that driving feels like part of the work, and a lot of it is. But not the bit most cleaners assume, and the trip they leave off can be worth more than the ones they claim. The ATO does not measure the distance or the hour of the day. It asks whether the drive is you doing your job or you getting yourself to it. Once that line is clear, the deduction is straightforward.

The commute you can't claim

The drive from home to your first site of the day, and from your last site back home, is private travel. It is not deductible, and it is the single most common thing cleaners claim by mistake. The reasons it feels like it should count do not change the answer:

• An early start doesn't help. Leaving at 4am to open an office, or heading home at midnight after a late shopfit clean, is still ordinary travel to and from work.
• A long drive doesn't help. Living an hour from your first site is your circumstance, not a work cost. The commute stays private however far you have to go.
• The gear in the boot doesn't help on its own. Carrying your own mop, vacuum or caddy because you can't put it on a bus does not, by itself, make the drive claimable. There is a narrow exception for genuinely bulky gear, and it is stricter than it sounds. It is further down.

Think of a window cleaner who spends the whole day at one high-rise and drives home tired at the end. That trip home is private, plain and simple.

Driving between sites the same day

Once you are moving from one workplace to another, the picture changes, and this is the reliable win for a cleaner who covers more than one site. These trips are deductible because the travel is the work, not the journey to it:

• Site to site on the same day. Finishing the first office and driving straight to the second, or across town from a shop clean to a warehouse. Neither end of that trip is home, so it counts.
• The supply depot to a client. Calling in for chemicals or fresh consumables and driving on to a job is deductible travel.
• Home straight to an alternative workplace. If you drive from home directly to a site that isn't your regular one, rather than to a fixed base you report to every day, that leg is on.

When the whole run counts: itinerant work

There is a group of cleaners who can claim more than the trips above, including the home-to-first-site and last-site-to-home legs that are private for everyone else. This is itinerant travel, and it applies when your work has no fixed base and moving between sites is genuinely built into the job. The ATO's own example is Hyun, an employee office cleaner who works several locations each day and claims the car expenses from home. If that is your working day, it can be yours too.

The test is real, though, and it is not "I drive a lot". These are the indicators the ATO looks for:

• Travel is fundamental to the work, not just how you happen to get there. The job is inherently mobile.
• You work across a "web" of sites, rather than reporting to one regular workplace.
• You usually cover more than one site before returning home, day in and day out.
• There is uncertainty about where you'll be sent next, often changing from day to day.

If that genuinely describes your week, the whole run can be deductible. If you clean the same building every shift and drive home from it, it does not, however far the drive is. Be honest with yourself about which one you are, because this is exactly where an overclaim gets unpicked.

The bulky-equipment exception

There is one other way the home-to-work trip can become deductible, and it is tightly drawn. All three conditions have to hold at the same time:

• The equipment is essential to the job, not just convenient to have with you.
• It is genuinely bulky, heavy and awkward enough that you need a vehicle to move it, not a caddy you could carry.
• There is nowhere secure to store it at the site, so you have no real choice but to cart it back and forth yourself.

Picture towing a trailer of pressure cleaners and a floor scrubber between jobs with no lockup to leave them in. That can qualify. But the moment a site offers you a secure store for the gear, the exception falls away and the drive is a private commute again. This is a genuine claim for a few cleaners, not a way to turn the daily trip to work into a deduction.

The two methods

When you do have deductible car travel, there are two ways to work out the claim. You use one or the other for the car across the year, and you are free to pick whichever comes out higher:

• Cents per kilometre. A set rate for each work kilometre, which the ATO updates every year, capped at 5,000 work kilometres. You don't keep fuel receipts for this one, but you still have to show how you worked out the number of kilometres, not settle on a round figure in July.
• The logbook method. You keep a logbook for twelve consecutive weeks to work out your work-use percentage, then claim that share of your actual running costs, so you also keep records of the fuel, servicing, registration and the rest. More paperwork, but it can be worth far more if you drive a lot between sites.

You can't run both at once. Fuel and servicing are already inside each method, so you cannot claim the rate or the logbook share and then add petrol and servicing on top. And if the car is on a novated or salary-sacrifice lease, you cannot claim its running costs at all, because you are not the one carrying them. You can still claim parking and tolls on genuine work trips in that car.

Parking, tolls, and what never counts

Parking and tolls follow the trip that earns them:

• Claimable on a genuine work trip. Paying to park at a client's building while you move between jobs, or a toll on the drive from one site to the next, is deductible.
• Not at a regular workplace. Parking at or near a site you clean every shift is part of the private commute, so it is out.
• Not on the commute, and never a fine. A toll on the way from home to your usual site goes with the rest of that private trip. And a parking or speeding fine is never deductible, no matter where you picked it up.

The records that hold it up

A car claim stands or falls on the record behind it, and this is where cleaner returns most often come undone. Cents per kilometre still needs a diary or a clear, shown working of your work kilometres. The logbook method needs a genuine twelve-week logbook plus the running-cost records. And every parking fee and toll needs its receipt. The dependable way to have all of it at tax time is to capture each trip when it happens, not to rebuild a year of between-site runs from memory. The ATO's free myDeductions app will log trips and hold receipts for you.

The bottom line

Leave the commute off, however early the start or however far the first site, and claim the driving that is genuinely part of the work: between sites the same day, the supply run to a client, and the whole run if you truly roam site to site with no fixed base. Keep the bulky-gear exception for when all three parts really hold. Pick the method that pays you more, hold the parking and toll receipts, and log the kilometres as you drive them. Do that and your car claim is both larger than most cleaners think and solid enough to stand behind.

General information only, not tax advice. Check the ATO or a registered tax agent for your situation.