Police car and travel: court, callouts and between stations

Car travel is one of the trickiest parts of a police return to get right. Officers claim the drive to work and get pulled up for it, or they never realise the run to court and the trip to a callout at another station are theirs to claim. The line the ATO draws is not about distance or the hour of the day. It is about whether the trip is part of doing your job or just getting yourself to it. Get that line right and the deduction sorts itself out.

The trip that catches everyone: home to your station

Driving from home to the station you are rostered at, and home again after your shift, is private travel. It is not deductible, and the usual reasons officers think it should be do not change that:

• A long drive doesn't help. Living an hour from your station is your circumstance, not a work cost. The commute stays private however far it is.
• Odd hours don't help. A 4am start, a night shift, a weekend callback to your normal station: the ATO treats all of it as ordinary travel to work.
• Carrying gear you can't take on a bus doesn't help on its own. The fact that you can't reasonably take a firearm or your duty belt on public transport does not, by itself, make the drive deductible. There is a narrow exception for genuinely bulky equipment, and it is stricter than most people expect. It is below.

The travel you can claim

Once you are at work, or moving for work, the picture changes. These trips are deductible because the travel is part of the job, not the journey to it:

• Between two jobs on the same day. If you finish your police shift and drive straight to a second job, say a security shift, that leg counts. The rule is that neither end of the trip is home.
• Between workplaces for the one employer. Your station out to a crime scene, or in to headquarters for a briefing, then back. Moving between work sites during your shift is deductible travel.
• Home straight to an alternate workplace. Home to court to give evidence, home to a station that isn't your usual one, or home to a school to run a safety talk. When you drive from home to a work location that isn't your regular station, that trip is on.

The bulky-equipment exception

There is one way home-to-work travel can become deductible, and it is tightly drawn. All three parts have to hold at once:

• The equipment is essential to your duties, not just handy to have with you.
• It is genuinely bulky, awkward and heavy enough that carrying it is a real burden, not simply a bag of kit.
• There is no secure place to store it at work, so you have no practical choice but to transport it yourself.

If your station has a secure locker for the gear, the exception falls away and the drive is private again. This is a genuine claim for the few, not a workaround for the commute.

The two methods, and picking the right one

When you do have deductible car travel, there are two ways to work it out. You use one or the other for the year, and you are free to pick whichever gives the larger deduction:

• Cents per kilometre. A set rate for each work kilometre, capped at 5,000 work kilometres in the year. No receipts for running costs, but you still have to show how you arrived at the number of kilometres. Check the current rate on the ATO site, because it is set each year.
• The logbook method. You work out the business-use share of your car from a logbook, then claim that share of your actual running costs across the year. More records, but it can be worth far more if you drive a lot for work.

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

Parking and tolls

These ride along with the trip that earns them:

• Claimable on a genuine work trip. The parking fee at headquarters when you are called in for a mandatory briefing, or the toll on the drive out to court, is deductible.
• Not at your regular station. Parking at or near the station you are rostered to is part of the private commute, so it is out.
• Not on the commute either. A toll you pay driving from home to your usual station goes the same way as the rest of that trip.

When work sends you away overnight

If your duties require you to travel and sleep away from home, your accommodation, meals and incidentals for that trip are deductible. The conditions are where officers slip:

• Nothing you were given or paid back. If the service provided the room and meals, or reimbursed you, there is no out-of-pocket cost to claim.
• You were actually required to stay. If the overnight wasn't necessary for the work, the cost is private.
• You didn't stay by choice. Deciding to book a room near work rather than drive home is your call, not a work expense, and it doesn't qualify.

The records that hold a car claim up

A car deduction lives or dies on the record behind it, and this is exactly where police claims come undone. Cents per kilometre still needs a diary or a reasonable, shown calculation of your work kilometres, not a round number you settled on in July. The logbook method needs a genuine logbook kept over a representative period. And parking, tolls and any overnight costs need their receipts. The reliable way to have all of it at tax time is to record the trip when it happens, not to rebuild a year of court runs and callouts from memory. The ATO's own myDeductions app will log kilometres and hold receipts for free.

The bottom line

Leave the commute off, however far or however odd the hours, and claim the travel that is genuinely part of the work: to court, to callouts, between stations and on to a second job. Pick the method that pays you more, keep the parking and toll receipts, and log the kilometres as you drive them. Do that and your car claim is both larger than most officers realise and solid enough to stand behind.

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