Itinerant Travel
Itinerant travel is defined as working in different places for short periods of time. Employees that may have itinerant travel include home care nurses, labourers, plumbers, electricians, home visit doctors, etc.
The general rule is that an employee’s travel to and from work is private and non-deductible.
An exception to this rule is where a taxpayer has ‘shifting places of work’, i.e. they are itinerant.
In TR 95/35, the ATO lists indicators of itinerant travel as:
- Where travel is a fundamental part of an employee’s work. That is, the employee must carry out their duties at several different places.
- The employee has no fixed place of work.
- The employee continually travels from one work site to another during the day i.e. a minimum of two work sites each day.
- There is a degree of uncertainty with the location of the employee’s employment.
Examples of employee travel that is not itinerant include:
- An employee working each day of the week at a different office location. This is private home to work travel.
- An employee going to the office and then travelling to a different office location during the day. The home to office travel is private, but the travel from the first office to the second office will be deductible work travel.
