Support worker car and travel: claiming the drive between clients

The car is where the money quietly leaks. You fill the tank yourself, you wear out your own tyres and brakes crossing town from one client to the next, and none of it shows up in your pay. For a community or home-care worker that driving is the single biggest deduction you have, and it is also the one people get wrong most often, in both directions. Some claim a trip they can't, and plenty more leave real money on the table because they never learned which parts of the run count. This chapter sorts out exactly that: the trips you can claim, the one you can't, the exception that changes the whole picture, and how to make sure you get the full value.

The trip that catches everyone: your commute is private

Start with the rule that trips people up, because getting it wrong is where a return draws a second look. The drive from home to your first client of the day, and the drive home from your last, is treated as a private commute. You cannot claim it. That holds however far you live from the run, and however odd the hour, so an early start out to a client forty minutes away is still your own cost, not the job's. Getting yourself to work is private, even when your work has no single front door.

There is one genuine exception to this, and it matters enough for support workers that it has its own section below. Read to the end before you write off your first and last legs.

The travel you can claim

Once the day is underway, most of the running around does count. You can generally claim:

• Driving directly between clients on the same day. Leaving one client's home and driving straight to the next is work travel, and across a full run those kilometres add up fast.
• Driving between two jobs on the same day. If you finish a shift with one employer and drive to a shift with another, that leg counts, as long as neither end is your home.
• Driving to an alternate workplace for the same employer. A trip out to a different site or office your provider sends you to, rather than your usual base, is deductible.
• Driving from home to a training venue. When your provider has you attend manual-handling, first aid or other training somewhere other than your normal workplace, that trip counts.
• Transporting a client. Driving a client to an appointment, to the shops, or wherever their care plan takes them is part of the work, and so is that travel.

The itinerant-work exception: when even your first and last trip counts

This is the part most support workers have never been told, and for a mobile carer it can be worth more than everything else on the page. If your work is genuinely itinerant, the ordinary commute rule flips, and the trip from home to your first client and home from your last become deductible too.

Itinerant work means your job has shifting places of work rather than a fixed one. You have no single base you report to, you are continually on the move from one client to the next through the day, and travel is a fundamental part of how the work is done. The ATO's own example of this is a community support worker who rotates between clients' homes with no fixed workplace. If that is your day, the whole of your driving may be on the table, first leg included.

Here is the catch, and it is a real one. It is not automatic, and it turns on the genuine pattern of your work, not on the job title. If one of your "clients" is really a regular, fixed workplace, for instance the same person you see on a steady weekly roster for months on end, the ATO can treat that leg as an ordinary commute rather than itinerant travel. So you may qualify, and you may not, and it depends on how your run actually looks over the year. Keep a proper travel record either way, and check your own situation with a registered tax agent before you rely on it. Done right, this is the difference between a good travel claim and a great one.

The two ways to claim your car, and why the default costs you

When you use your own car for that work travel, there are two methods, and you claim whichever gives you the bigger result:

• Cents per kilometre. A set rate for every work kilometre, capped at 5,000 work kilometres a year. You do not need receipts, but you do need to show how you worked the kilometres out, so a diary of your work trips is essential. The rate changes each year, so check the current figure on the ATO's page rather than an old one.
• The logbook method. You keep a twelve-week logbook to set what share of your driving is for work, then apply that percentage to your actual running costs for the year: fuel, servicing, registration, insurance and the car's decline in value. It is more effort, but it lifts the ceiling off your claim.

This is where a lot of support workers quietly lose money. Cents per kilometre is the easy default, so most people reach for it, but it stops paying once you pass 5,000 work kilometres. A full-time community worker on the road all day usually drives well past that, and for them the logbook is normally the far better deal, because it claims a share of everything the car costs rather than capping out. If your run is serious, do the twelve weeks and compare. One thing to keep straight: you don't add fuel and servicing on top of either method, because both already build the running costs in.

The extras that ride along with the drive

A few smaller work-travel costs sit outside the car methods and are claimable in their own right, and they are easy to forget:

• Parking and tolls on work trips. The meter at a client's appointment or the toll on the way between clients counts, though not the parking at your own regular workplace.
• Taxi, rideshare or public transport for work. If you take a cab, an Uber, a bus or a train in the course of the work, keep the receipt and claim it.

Two things that trip carers up

Before you tally it, two situations that change what you can claim:

• Carrying bulky equipment doesn't usually apply to you. Home-to-work travel can sometimes count if you must carry bulky, essential gear and there's nowhere secure to store it at work. For carers this is rare, because a hoist and the heavy equipment live at the client's home or the facility, not in your boot.
• A salary-sacrifice or novated lease car closes the door. If your car is on a novated lease or salary-sacrificed, you cannot claim car expenses at all, because the employer leases the vehicle. You can still claim parking and tolls on work trips, so keep those receipts.

The record is the whole claim

A travel claim stands or falls on the record behind it, and a year of driving is impossible to reconstruct from memory in July. What you need is a logbook or a diary of your work kilometres, plus receipts for your running costs if you go the logbook route. The trick is to capture it as the run happens, not to piece it together the week your return is due. The ATO's own myDeductions app will hold the basics for free.

The bottom line

For a support worker, the drive is the deduction, so it pays to get it right. Leave off the private trip in to your first client and home from your last, unless your work is genuinely itinerant, in which case those legs may come back to you as well. Claim the driving between clients and jobs, the trips to training and alternate sites, and transporting the people you care for. Run the logbook against cents per kilometre if you are on the road all day, because the easy default often short-changes you. Keep the record as you go. Do that, and the fuel and the wear you pour into your own car finally show up where they should, on your side of the ledger.

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