Doctor car and travel: between hospitals and the on-call myth

A doctor's week does not keep office hours. You drive in before dawn for a ward round, back out to a second hospital for a list, and in again at 2am when the phone goes. It feels like the car is doing work the whole time, and some accountant guides written for medicine lean into that feeling. But the ATO asks the same question of your driving that it asks of everyone else's: was the trip part of doing the job, or part of getting to it. For a doctor there is one place that question is answered wrongly more than any other, and it is the on-call callback. So it is worth starting there.

The commute you can't claim, including the on-call callback

The drive from home to your regular hospital, and home again when the shift ends, is private travel. It is not deductible, and it stays private no matter how the day is shaped. Living an hour out because that is where the posting is does not change it. Irregular hours do not change it. And being called back in after hours does not change it either.

This last point is the doctor myth, and it needs correcting head-on. Some specialist tax guides tell you that an on-call callback makes the home-to-hospital trip deductible. The ATO position, set out in TR 2021/1, is that it does not. Travelling in to start your shift is a prerequisite to the work rather than part of it, and that holds whether the shift starts at 8am or when a page wakes you at 2am. You are still driving in to begin work once you arrive, so the trip is a commute.

There is one narrow exception, and it is genuinely narrow. Where substantive work truly commences at home, for example you remotely triage or manage the patient by phone first and then drive in to complete that same task, the travel can be part of the work rather than a lead-up to it. Most rostered callbacks do not meet this. You take the call, you drive in, and the work happens on arrival, which is a commute. Treat the exception as rare, not as the way to reclassify every night you get paged.

The trips that count

Once you are moving for work rather than moving to reach it, the answer flips. These legs are deductible:

• Directly between two separate jobs the same day. Finishing one job and driving straight to another, where neither end is home, is travel between workplaces.
• Between two workplaces for the same employer on the same day. Driving between two hospitals, or between your consulting rooms and a hospital, to work at both for the one employer is deductible.
• Home directly to an alternative workplace. Driving from home straight to a hospital or clinic that is not the one you regularly report to counts, unlike the drive to your usual base.
• The whole run, if you have no fixed base. A doctor who genuinely has no regular workplace and continually travels place to place, such as an after-hours home-visit doctor moving patient to patient, can claim the full run rather than just the middle legs.

The two methods

Once you have deductible car travel, there are two ways to work out the number. You use one or the other for the car across the year:

• Cents per kilometre. A set rate for each work kilometre that the ATO resets each year, capped at 5,000 work kilometres. No fuel receipts needed, but you still have to show how you arrived at the kilometres.
• The logbook method. You keep a logbook to work out your work-use percentage, then claim that share of every running cost for the year: fuel, servicing, registration, insurance and the decline in value. More records, but no 5,000-kilometre ceiling.

One method per car. If the car is on a novated or salary-sacrifice lease you get no car-expense claim at all, because the employer is the one leasing it, though parking and tolls on genuine work trips still count. And a vehicle rated to carry one tonne or more is not a "car" for tax: you leave both methods behind and claim the actual costs for the work portion, backed by receipts.

Parking and tolls

Parking and tolls follow the trip that earns them. They are deductible on a genuine work trip, such as the fee you pay to park while presenting at a training venue or the toll on a drive between two hospitals. They are not deductible at or near your regular workplace, so staff parking at the hospital you report to is part of the private commute, and they are not deductible on the commute itself. A fine is never deductible, even one you pick up rushing in for an emergency.

Overnight work travel

Where the work requires you to sleep away from home, the cost of being away is deductible. For a locum placement, a rural rotation or an interstate conference, accommodation, meals and incidentals are claimable for the nights you are genuinely required to stay. Apportion for any private days you tack on, so fourteen locum days followed by a few days sightseeing gives you the fourteen. Overseas accommodation always needs receipts, and there is nothing to claim if you are reimbursed or you return home the same day.

Relocation is not deductible

Moving house for a rotation, a transfer or a new post is a private cost, even though it can feel forced on you rather than chosen. The removalists, the transport of your goods, the temporary accommodation and the travel to the new location are all part of starting to earn income in that place, not part of doing the job once you are there, so none of it is a deduction. If your employer pays you a relocation allowance in cash, that allowance is assessable income you declare. If instead the employer pays for or reimburses the move directly, it may be handled through the fringe benefits rules on their side, but it is still not a deduction for you.

The records that hold it up

A car claim stands or falls on the record behind it. Cents per kilometre still needs a diary or a reliable, shown working of your work kilometres, not a round number decided in July. The logbook method needs a genuine logbook plus the running-cost records to sit behind it. And every parking fee and toll needs its receipt. The dependable way to have the lot at tax time is to note each trip on the day you drive it, rather than piecing a year of ward rounds and locum runs back together from memory. The ATO's own myDeductions app will log trips and hold receipts for free.

The bottom line

Leave the commute off, however far the drive or however odd the hours, and do not let the on-call callback fool you into claiming the trip in. Claim the driving that is genuinely part of the job: directly between jobs or workplaces on the same day, home to a hospital that is not your regular one, and the whole run only if you truly have no fixed base. Keep the on-call home-start exception for the rare case where the work really begins at home. Hold the parking and toll receipts, apportion overnight travel for private days, and record the kilometres as you drive them.

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