NDIS Travel and Kilometre Claiming: What Providers Can Actually Bill

NDIS travel is two separate things, and the scheme funds them under different rules. Labour cost is the support worker's time in transit, claimed against the support item being delivered. Non-labour transport is the running cost of the vehicle, claimed per kilometre under its own item. They have different rules, different caps and different evidence requirements, and conflating them is the most common travel-claiming error.

Travel is also, in most providers we see, the single largest category of revenue that is simply never claimed. Not disputed, not rejected — never submitted, because nobody wrote the kilometres down.

What travel time can you claim under NDIS travel claiming rules?

Travel time is claimable only in defined circumstances, and it is capped. In most regions the cap is up to 30 minutes for a single support, extending to up to 60 minutes in remote and very remote areas. It must be agreed with the participant in advance — a service agreement that says nothing about travel is not a basis for billing it.

Three qualifications matter:

• It is the worker's travel to the participant, apportioned where the worker travels to more than one participant in sequence.
• It is claimed at the rate of the support item being delivered, not at a separate travel rate.
• The cap is a maximum, not an entitlement. You claim actual travel, up to the cap.

What about kilometres?

Kilometres are a separate claim entirely — the cost of running the vehicle, not the cost of the person. The rate depends on whose vehicle it is:

Vehicle	How it is claimed
Worker's own car	Per-kilometre rate
Provider-owned vehicle	Per-kilometre rate
Modified or wheelchair-accessible vehicle	Higher rate reflecting actual running cost

There is a further distinction that catches people out: kilometres travelled with the participant in the vehicle, as part of delivering a support, are a different thing again from the worker's travel to reach them. Community access that involves driving a participant somewhere is transport delivered as part of the support.

Why the kilometres go missing

The mechanism is always the same, and it is not carelessness.

A worker finishes a shift, drives 14 kilometres to the next participant, and completes that shift too. At no point in that sequence is there a natural moment to record 14 kilometres. The timesheet asks about hours. The progress note asks about the support. By the time an invoice is raised, days later, the journey is gone — nobody can reconstruct it and nobody tries.

So the leg happened, it was legitimately claimable, and it is invisible. Multiply by a workforce and a year.

Deriving travel instead of asking for it

The addresses are already on file. The worker's home address is on their record; each participant's address is on theirs; the roster already knows who was seen, in what order, on what day. The journey is therefore derivable without asking anyone to remember anything.

Three rules make derived travel safe to bill:

1. Never return zero for unknown. If an address cannot be resolved, that leg must surface as unresolved. Zero is a real answer meaning no travel, and quietly substituting it for "I could not work it out" under-bills silently and forever.
2. Compute, then let a person apply. A system proposing legs is useful. A system writing billing rows unattended is a liability.
3. A straight line is not a road. Distance between two points is not distance driven. Report the estimate as an estimate, state the factor applied, and let anyone correct a leg.

Getting travel onto the invoice

Travel needs to survive three handoffs to be paid: it must be captured against the shift, carried onto the timesheet and approved with it, and then appear as its own invoice line under the right support item.

Most systems lose it at the second handoff. Kilometres captured on a shift that do not flow into the timesheet approval are kilometres that get approved by nobody and invoiced by nobody. If you want to test your own process, take one worker's day last week that involved two participants, and follow the travel from the roster to the invoice. If it does not arrive, you have found where your travel revenue goes.

Before you claim

• Check the service agreement mentions travel and how it will be charged.
• Confirm the participant's plan has funding in the right category.
• Use the current support item for travel — it is not the same item as the support.
• Keep the basis of the distance, so a queried claim can be answered.

Travel caps, rates and item numbers are set by the NDIS Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits and change at least annually. Confirm the current values before relying on them.