Can my provider charge me for traveling to my house for work?

In some cases, Providers are able to charge transport costs to cover costs of working with a participant in their home.

Support Workers may charge a fee for travel to a participant’s home.

Therapists may charge travel costs both to and from an appointment.

A support worker may charge the following:

· Up to 30 Minutes of travel to an appointment in an MMM1, MMM2 or MMM3 zone

· Up to 60 Minutes of travel to an appointment in an MMM4 or MMM5 zone.

A Therapist may charge the same as the above, however therapy providers are also able to charge again for the travel time back to their place of business. This means that a Therapy provider may charge you twice for travel.

In MMM6 and MMM7 (remote and very remote) regions, these costs should be negotiated with the participant to ensure that the costs are affordable. Providers are able to negotiate this with participants to enter into specific agreements for these costs to be covered. This may mean that a provider will visit several participants in the same remote area on the same day to be able to share the costs of the travel.

These time limits are capped, which means that if a provider needs to travel 40 minutes in an MMM2 zone, they are only able to charge for 30 minutes of their travel time.

Providers should clearly mark on their invoices which part of the costs are for providing a service and which parts are related to travel costs.

These costs are billed at the hourly rate that the provider is charging you – so if you had a support worker who was charging you $40 per hour, they could claim a portion of this amount for their travel costs.

For self-managed and plan-managed clients, both hourly rates and travel costs are negotiable with the provider - but should not exceed the caps that are in place.

A provider should be charging for actual travel time to an appointment (eg. If travel was only 10 minutes, they should not be billing for 30 minutes) and if you see that this is occurring, you should speak to the provider and have this rectified. If a provider is charging you more than this, it can have an impact on your plan funding and may mean that you are not getting the support you need.

Please note that this does not include any travel costs that are incurred whilst a provider is working. If your provider is taking you into the community whilst on shift, they are also able to bill a participant for this time in a different format. We will cover this in an upcoming blog article.

The NDIS price guide, available on the NDIS website, contains more information about these costs. Please see the map below to check your area. For a more detailed map, please follow the link below – you will need to search using your address and selecting the ‘Modified Monash Model 2019’ filter for the map to be able to see which region you are located in.

https://www.health.gov.au/resources/apps-and-tools/health-workforce-locator/health-workforce-locator#hwc-map