Travel between home and work
In general, you can’t claim tax deductions for travel between home and work.
However, there are some exceptions:
What are the exceptions?
Transporting essential work equipment
If your vehicle is necessary to carry bulky, valuable, sensitive, or otherwise impractical- to-carry work equipment that you use both at home and at work.
Itinerant workers
If your job (like a plumber or electrician) means you have to travel between different clients and you don’t have a separate business base.
Emergency call-outs
If you’re responsible for handling emergency calls before you even leave home and your work requires you to work from home part of the time. Therefore, since a doctor normally works in a medical practice and not from home, if he/she is called out at night, this exception does not apply.
Home as a workplace
If your home is your main workplace or base of operations, travel from home to another workplace is deductible – provided you are working on the same issue before and after the trip. Just doing some work at home isn’t enough; you need to have ongoing work-related tasks.
What about stops along the way?
If you make a small detour, like stopping at a shop that’s directly on your route or very close by, it’s considered incidental, so your trip is still deductible. But if the stop is more significant, then you have made two journeys, one of which is business and the other is private.
What counts as incidental?
If your detour adds less than 5% to your total journey OR is no more than 2km extra, it’s still considered incidental. The smaller of these two numbers applies.
What’s NOT deductible?
- Taking an electric vehicle home to charge.
- Taking a vehicle home for security reasons.
