Travel claiming under the NDIS is one of the most frequently misunderstood areas of provider billing. The rules are specific, have changed over various price guide iterations, and differ depending on whether you are claiming for a worker's travel time, vehicle costs, or a participant's transport.
1. Provider travel (worker travel to deliver a support) — covers the time and costs a worker incurs travelling from their base or home to a participant's location, or between two participants' locations on a back-to-back roster. 2. Transport as a support item — covers situations where the support itself is transporting the participant to a medical appointment or community activity. 3. Non-labour travel costs — covers out-of-pocket vehicle costs such as tolls, parking, and per-kilometre vehicle reimbursement.
You can claim the worker's time at the same hourly rate as the support being delivered, up to a maximum of 30 minutes each way for metropolitan areas. Critically, you can only claim provider travel if it is agreed to in the participant's service agreement. For non-labour costs, providers can claim a per-kilometre rate for workers using their own vehicles — currently $0.97 per kilometre (check the current NDIS Support Catalogue). Tolls and parking can be claimed at actual cost with receipts.
Explicitly not claimable: travel between the worker's home and their first participant of the day (ordinary commuting); travel after the worker's last participant of the day; vehicle depreciation, insurance, or registration; and travel that is not documented (if you do not have a travel log with date, origin, destination, and kilometres, the claim is not substantiated).
The most practical way to manage NDIS travel claiming compliantly is to capture travel data at the point of service delivery, not retrospectively at billing time. When a worker clocks in and out using a GPS-enabled care management platform, the system can record the worker's location, calculate the distance between back-to-back participant locations, and generate a travel log automatically.
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