If your payroll doesn’t include a km allowance for workers travelling between participants, you’re underpaying your team. Here’s what SCHADS requires.
If your support workers are travelling between participants in their own cars and your payroll doesn’t include a travel allowance for those kilometres, you’re underpaying your team. That’s not a grey area. The SCHADS Award is clear. And Fair Work can come knocking.
This is one of the most commonly missed obligations in the sector right now. It builds up across your whole roster, week after week, and most providers don’t find it until they’re looking at a Fair Work inquiry or a worker complaint.
Here’s exactly what the Award requires and what you need to check today.
Two separate obligations, not one
The SCHADS Award has a travel clause that most providers have never read closely. When your workers travel between participants during a shift in their own vehicles, two things must happen.
You pay them for the time. And you pay them a kilometre allowance for using their own car.
Both. Not one or the other. Both.
This is where providers get caught out. They pay for travel time and assume that covers the obligation. It doesn’t. Travel time pay and the kilometre allowance are two separate requirements under the Award. One does not replace the other.
Travel between participants is work time
Travel between participants during a shift is work time under the SCHADS Award. It’s not a break. It’s not the worker’s personal time.
If a worker finishes a support session at one participant’s home and drives to the next participant’s home, that driving time is compensable. It goes on the timesheet. It gets paid at their ordinary hourly rate.
There’s no ambiguity here. If they’re on shift and they’re travelling on your instruction, they’re working.
The kilometre allowance is a separate line item
On top of paying for travel time, the Award sets a rate per kilometre that you must pay when a worker uses their own vehicle for work travel. This allowance covers the cost of running their car. It’s separate from their hourly rate. It appears as its own line in payroll.
If you’re paying travel time and not the kilometre allowance, you’re still short.
If you’re paying the kilometre allowance and not the travel time, you’re still short.
Both obligations exist independently. Both must be met for every travel leg between participants.
What you’re not obligated to pay
There’s a distinction worth knowing.
Travel from a worker’s home to their first participant is generally not your obligation to pay. Travel from their last participant back home at the end of the shift falls into the same category. That’s the worker’s ordinary commute.
The travel between participants during the shift is your responsibility. Every kilometre. Every minute of it.
What this looks like on a real roster
Think about a standard Monday roster. A support worker starts at a participant’s home at eight in the morning, finishes at ten, drives across town to the next participant, supports them until one, then heads home.
That drive between participants, those minutes and those kilometres, go in your payroll. Not as a favour. As an award entitlement.
If your scheduling system isn’t capturing that travel leg and your payroll isn’t paying it, you have a compliance gap in your records right now.
Scale that across a team of ten workers, each doing two or three shifts a week with travel between participants. The underpayment figure adds up fast. And it’s backdated to when the underpayment began, not to when you discovered it.
Why this is a bigger risk than most providers realise Fair Work has been active in the NDIS sector.
Underpayment claims are one of the most common compliance issues raised against providers. Travel between participants is one of the most commonly missed items on that list.
The reason it builds up is that it happens every shift, for every worker who drives between participants. A small weekly underpayment across a full team across twelve months becomes a significant liability.
And underpayment isn’t just a financial risk. It damages the trust your team has in you, and your reputation as an employer in a sector that’s already hard to recruit in.
Workers talk. If your payroll is short and they find out, the damage goes well beyond the back pay.
What to do this week
Pull your roster and look at how travel between participants is being recorded.
Are your workers logging those travel legs? Is your payroll system capturing those minutes and those kilometres? Is the kilometre allowance appearing as a separate line?
If you’re not sure, that’s your starting point. Go to fairwork.gov.au and read the SCHADS Award, specifically the travel provisions. If you find a gap, get advice from a payroll specialist or contact Fair Work directly.
Don’t leave it. Every week you leave it, it compounds.