This is the question that decides most people’s business-use percentage, and it is the one most often answered with wishful thinking.
The general rule is short. You cannot claim trips between your home and your regular place of work, except in limited circumstances. Those trips put you in a position to start work and earn income, but they are not part of performing your work duties, so the cost is private. Source: ATO, trips you can and can’t claim.
The rest of this page is the detail that actually gets people wrong.
The eight reasons that do not change the answer
The ATO is unusually direct about this. You cannot claim trips between your home and your regular place of work even if you:
- live a long way from your regular place of work
- work outside normal business hours, for example shift work or overtime
- do minor work-related tasks on the way to work or the way home, for example picking up the mail
- go between your home and regular place of work more than once a day
- are on call, for example you are on standby duty and your employer contacts you at home to come into work
- have no public transport near where you work or live
- do some work at home
- work from home running your own business and travel directly to a place of work where you work for somebody else
That last one catches more people than the others, because it feels like it should qualify. Running your own business from home does not make the drive to a job you do for someone else deductible.
What you can claim
Setting the commute aside, you can claim the cost of transport on trips taken in the course of performing your work duties. The ATO’s own list includes travel to:
- meet a client, from your regular place of work
- attend work-related conferences or meetings away from your regular place of work
- deliver items or collect supplies
- travel between workplaces of your employer, or between clients
- go between two or more separate places of employment, provided none of them is your home, such as when you have more than one job
- travel from your regular place of work to an alternative place of work, for example from your office to a client’s premises
- travel from home to an alternative place of work to perform your duties, for example from your home to a training venue for work-related training
Note the last one. Travel from home is not automatically private. It is private when the destination is your regular place of work.
Regular and alternative places of work
That distinction does the work in every one of these rules, so it is worth being exact.
A regular place of work is the usual or normal place where you start and finish working for your employer. You can have more than one. The ATO’s example is someone who works in one of their employer’s retail stores three days a week and a different store the other two: both are regular places of work.
An alternative place of work is somewhere you perform your duties but which is not the usual or normal place you work. A solicitor’s office is a regular place of work; the court is an alternative place of work.
This is also why a second office is not automatically claimable. If you work from the city office Monday to Thursday and a suburban office every Friday as a standard arrangement, both are regular places of work on those days, and neither commute is deductible.
The exceptions that genuinely exist
The ATO says home to work travel is private “except in limited circumstances”. Two of those are well documented and worth knowing.
Carrying bulky tools or equipment
You may be able to claim trips between home and work where you transport bulky tools or equipment, but only if all of the following are true:
- the tools or equipment are essential to your employment duties
- they are bulky, meaning that because of their size and weight they are awkward to transport and can only be transported conveniently by motor vehicle
- there is no secure storage area for them at the workplace
Source: ATO, tradies and what you can claim.
The third condition fails most often. If your employer provides a lockup and you take the tools home anyway, that is your choice, and the travel stays private.
This exception also carries its own record-keeping. You need a record of all work items you carry, their size and weight, evidence that they are essential to your work, and evidence that your employer did not provide secure storage. That is well beyond a line in a logbook, and it is worth keeping as you go rather than reconstructing later.
Itinerant work
If your work is itinerant, meaning you have shifting places of work, travel between home and work can be deductible, because you are treated as travelling in the performance of your duties from the moment you leave home.
The indicators come from case law, collected in the ATO’s public ruling TR 95/34. The three main ones are:
- travel is a fundamental part of the work
- there is a web of workplaces in your regular employment, meaning you have no fixed place of work
- you continually travel from one work site to another, regularly working at more than one site before returning home
Four further factors point the same way, to a lesser degree: uncertainty of location with no long-term plan or regular pattern, your home operating as a base of operations, having to carry bulky equipment from home to different sites, and an employer allowance paid in recognition of continual travel between sites.
Source: TR 95/34, paragraphs 7 to 9.
Three things the ruling itself is careful to say, and they matter more than the list. The characteristics are not exhaustive. No single factor is decisive on its own. And whether work is itinerant is a question of fact determined by individual circumstances: it is the nature of your duties that decides it, not your occupation or your industry, and it can be a permanent or a temporary feature of a job.
So working at more than one location is not, by itself, itinerancy. Someone who attends two known sites on a fixed roster is not itinerant; someone who does not know at the start of a week where they will be sent is much closer to it. If you are near the line, put it to a registered tax agent rather than deciding from a general page.
Other limited circumstances exist beyond these two, and the tests are fact-specific. This page does not set them out, because a wrong answer here costs a deduction.
Partly private trips
Real days do not divide cleanly. You drive from a client back toward the office and stop at the supermarket. You visit a site on the way to a weekend away.
Where travel is partly private, you can only claim the transport expenses incurred in the course of performing your work duties. The work portion is deductible and the private portion is not, and your logbook should record the split rather than rounding it in your favour.
Apportioning honestly is also self-protective. A logbook with no mixed trips in it anywhere describes a life nobody leads.
What this means for your logbook
The purpose column is where this all lands. Every journey needs a recorded reason, and the reason is what establishes that the trip was work travel rather than the commute. See what a logbook has to contain.
Two habits that make the difference:
Write the actual destination and reason. “Site inspection, 14 Waratah St” carries the case. “Work” does not.
Classify the commute as private and leave it there. The first and last trip of the day are usually private, and marking them so is what makes the rest of the record credible. A logbook where every trip is business is not a strong logbook. It is a claim that will not survive being looked at.
If you are weighing whether the logbook method is worth keeping at all once the commute comes out, the method calculator will show you the difference on your own kilometres.