Car travel is one of the trickiest parts of a police return to get right. Officers claim the drive to work and get pulled up for it, or they never realise the run to court and the trip to a callout at another station are theirs to claim. The line the ATO draws is not about distance or the hour of the day. It is about whether the trip is part of doing your job or just getting yourself to it. Get that line right and the deduction sorts itself out.
The trip that catches everyone: home to your station
Driving from home to the station you are rostered at, and home again after your shift, is private travel. It is not deductible, and the usual reasons officers think it should be do not change that:
- A long drive doesn't help. Living an hour from your station is your circumstance, not a work cost. The commute stays private however far it is.
- Odd hours don't help. A 4am start, a night shift, a weekend callback to your normal station: the ATO treats all of it as ordinary travel to work.
- Carrying gear you can't take on a bus doesn't help on its own. The fact that you can't reasonably take a firearm or your duty belt on public transport does not, by itself, make the drive deductible. There is a narrow exception below, and it is stricter than most people expect.
The travel you can claim
Once you are at work, or moving for work, the picture changes. These trips are deductible because the travel is part of the job, not the journey to it:
The bulky-equipment exception
There is one way home-to-work travel can become deductible, and it is tightly drawn. All three parts have to hold at once:
If your station has a secure locker for the gear, the exception falls away and the drive is private again. This is a genuine claim for the few, not a workaround for the commute.
The two methods, and picking the right one
When you do have deductible car travel, there are two ways to work it out. You use one or the other for the year, and you are free to pick whichever gives the larger deduction:
A set rate for each work kilometre, capped at 5,000 work kilometres in the year. No receipts for running costs, but you still have to show how you arrived at the number of kilometres. Check the current rate on the ATO site, because it is set each year.
You work out the business-use share of your car from a logbook, then claim that share of your actual running costs across the year. More records, but it can be worth far more if you drive a lot for work.
You can't stack them. Fuel and servicing are already inside both methods, so you cannot claim the rate or the logbook share and then add running costs on top. And if the car is on a salary-sacrifice or novated lease, you cannot claim its running costs at all, because you are not the one bearing them. You can still claim parking and tolls on genuine work trips in that car.
Parking and tolls
These ride along with the trip that earns them:
When work sends you away overnight
If your duties require you to travel and sleep away from home, your accommodation, meals and incidentals for that trip are deductible. The conditions are where officers slip:
The records that hold a car claim up
A car deduction lives or dies on the record behind it, and this is exactly where police claims come undone. Cents per kilometre still needs a diary or a reasonable, shown calculation of your work kilometres, not a round number you settled on in July. The logbook method needs a genuine logbook kept over a representative period. And parking, tolls and any overnight costs need their receipts. The reliable way to have all of it at tax time is to record the trip when it happens, not to rebuild a year of court runs and callouts from memory. The ATO's own myDeductions app will log kilometres and hold receipts for free.
The bottom line
Leave the commute off, however far or however odd the hours, and claim the travel that is genuinely part of the work: to court, to callouts, between stations and on to a second job. Pick the method that pays you more, keep the parking and toll receipts, and log the kilometres as you drive them. Do that and your car claim is both larger than most officers realise and solid enough to stand behind.
See what your work travel, gear and other claims come to at tax time.
General information only, not tax advice. Check the ATO or a registered tax agent for your situation.