If you are required to travel as part of your job, then you likely incur various costs. Whether making a short trip to attend a meeting or taking an overseas trip for an extended period, you can deduct your travel expenses. However, the laws surrounding travel expenses are complicated, and the Australia Taxation Office (ATO) keeps close tabs on travel expenses. So, it’s vital to pay close attention to what you claim to avoid mistakes.
What is work-related travel expenses
Work-related travel expenses are expenses incurred while travelling for work. If you incur any expenses related to work-related travel, such as accommodation or meals, you may be able to claim them as travel expenses on your tax return.
Using your car for work
If your job requires you to use a personal vehicle, you are entitled to deduct the motoring costs you incur while completing your job. This does not generally include the commute you make from your home to your place of work.
Eligibility
However, there are limited circumstances that may allow it. For example,
- An employee travelling between work sites throughout the day can claim their commute.
- If you travel directly from one job to a second job, as long as you do not return home in between.
- If you are travelling to a course or meeting for work, you can deduct expenses.
Methods to calculate work-related travel expenses
There are two options when it comes to vehicle travel for work tax deductions.
- As of April 2023, there is a flat rate of 78 cents per kilometre, and you can claim up to 5,000 km. You will need to keep a log of your travel to determine how far you travel for work purposes.
- Use a logbook if you travel and detail your running expenses, from mileage to fuel, servicing, repairs, insurance, and depreciation. If you use the logbook method, your logbook needs to show your work-related trips for a minimum continuous period of 12 weeks
Alternatively, you can use ar eputable tax software that will provide you with mileage auto-tracking and a simple snap and store for all of the receipts related to your business expenses.
Ensure you maintain your logbook for a minimum of 12 weeks before relying on it for your income tax return. The log should include odometer readings to determine the proportion of time you use it for work purposes. Store all receipts and invoices noting your spending on your vehicle so that you can claim the correct percentage of vehicle expenses.
Travel to and from work is considered a private expenditure unless your employer requires you to transport bulky equipment and vehicles. That being said, the ATO pays close attention to these types of claims and may disallow them.
Other work-related transport expenses in Australia
There are other expenses that can also be claimed for work-related travel if they are for:
- Heavy vehicles and utes if they have a carrying capacity of more than one tonne
- Vans with a carrying capacity of 9 or more passengers
- Fees for hiring or renting a car
- Costs incurred while driving someone else’s vehicle for work purposes, such as fuel expenses
- Public transportation fares, including air, bus, train, tram, ferry, taxi, ride-share or ride-sourcing fares
- Expenses associated with work-related transport expenses such as bridge tolls, road tolls, and car parking fees
Other travel expenses
You can claim additional work-related travel expenses for costs you incur that your employer doesn’t reimburse. These travel expenses must be work-related rather than your daily commute to and from work.
- Airfare and taxi fares
- Tunnel or bridge tolls
- Car parking
- The cost of public transport
If you are fined for a motoring offence, whether it is for parking, speeding or otherwise, you cannot claim these.
Overnight meals & accommodation
If you are travelling away from home, you can claim accommodation, meals and entertainment. You cannot claim meal expenses if your employer reimburses you or provides you with a full allowance for these expenses. A number of businesses will provide an allowance, expenses included, so the employee doesn’t need to cover the costs. You may be taxed for those allowances, in which case a deduction is possible for costs incurred.
The ATO provides a lengthy list of what is viewed as a reasonable spend on accommodation, meals, and incidental expenses. You won’t need to produce detailed records with receipts or invoices if you claim below the specified ATO allowance. If you exceed the reasonable amounts as laid out by the ATO, or you don’t receive an allowance, then you need to keep detailed records to show your spending wasn’t extravagant.
The ATO established a reasonable amount to highlight when detailed records must be kept. Many people would assume that they can claim this maximum amount, but we don’t recommend you do this. You must only claim the amount of money you spent.
Even if you claim below the reasonable amount, you should be able to prove the expenses you incurred. A bank or credit card statement is viewed as sufficient evidence should the need arise. It will help support your claim that you were in the particular area at the time you claimed.
As long as your travel includes an overnight stay, you can claim business meals, food and beverages. You can’t claim meals when you work from home. You could claim tax travel expenses if you always work from home and need to travel to an office.
What you can’t claim
Travel for personal reasons or between your home and your workplace can’t be claimed Examples include:
- Travel between your home and regular place of work or vice versa
- Travel for personal reasons, like running errands on the way to or from work
- Travel for overtime or out-of-hours work
- Travel from your home (which is also your place of work for one job) to another location where you work for someone else
Read our guide to tax deductions to learn about other tax deductions.
Other situations that allow you to claim travel deductions
You may be able to claim work-related travel expenses tax if you attend a work conference or course. If it is local, you can claim transport or mileage. If it’s interstate or overseas, you can claim accommodation, airfares and meals.
In all cases, your best bet is to visit a tax agent to ensure your travel deductions are above board.
This article originally appeared on QuickBooks and was syndicated by MediaFeed.org.
43 incredible facts about Australia you may not believe are true
Australia Day celebrations this year will take a decidedly solemn turn as residents around the country reflect on the devastating bushfires that have stunned the nation and the world.
Each year, Australia Day commemorates the arrival of the first fleet of British ships and the raising of the flag of Great Britain at Sydney Cove in 1788. The celebrations are typically a balance between festive, commemorative and respectful, but at many celebrations this year, fireworks shows will be scrapped and more reflection will be on tap.
In Sydney, for example, firefighters will take center stage. An expected 50 firefighters and their families will join New South Wales Governor Margaret Beazley on board the HMAS Canberra for a 21-gun military salute in Sydney Harbour.
“We want to maintain a spirit of optimism, but also absolutely acknowledge the volunteers and all those who have served in different ways, particularly in the last few difficult months,” Australia Day Council NSW chair Andrew Parker was reported as telling the Sydney Morning Herald.
In commemoration of Australia Day, and in recognition of the devastating losses from ongoing bushfires, we’ve put together a list of facts you may not already know about Australia. It’s a vast and fascinating country with a complicated past. Known for its stunning natural features and entrancing wildlife, many natural wonders remain unknown. From the Great Barrier Reef to the Blue Mountains and beyond, there’s nowhere in the world quite like Australia.
Here are 43 facts about the land down under you may not have known:
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Aboriginal Australians have been in Australia for more than 50,000 years. They may even have migrated over from Africa as much as 70,000 years ago. They are considered the oldest population of humans living outside Africa.
PomInOz / istockphoto
Aboriginal Australians currently have more than 250 distinct languages spread throughout Australia.
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Australia is the sixth largest country in the world, going by physical size, and the largest island. In fact, it is the only country in the world that is also an island and a continent.
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As of 2017, there were twice as many kangaroos in Australia as humans. Their numbers have likely been significantly impacted by the recent bushfires, though.
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Australia is one of the least densely populated countries in the world, with an average population density of 3.1 people per square kilometer. However, individual cities are super densely populated. Melbourne has an average population density of 17,500 people per square kilometer. Even still, not a single Australian city breaks the top 50 of the world’s most densely populated cities.
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Australia was called “New Holland” by the 17th century Dutch navigators who first landed there. The name “Australia” was first suggested in 1803 by English explorer Matthew Finders. Australia derives from the Latin australis meaning southern.
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January 2019 was the hottest month ever recorded in Australia, with a mean temperature exceeding 30C (86F). There were even five days in mid-January that topped 40C (104F) across the country.
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Australia has more than 10,000 beaches, surpassing every other country in the world. You could spend 27 years trying to visit Australia’s beaches (one per day) and still not see them all.
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Most of Australia’s population is concentrated near those beaches, with more than 85% of Australians being within 50 kilometers (roughly 31 miles) of a coastline.
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One of Australia’s best known natural wonders is the Great Barrier Reef, one of the seven natural wonders of the world. In fact, the Great Barrier Reef is larger than the Great Wall of China. It’s so large that it can be seen from space, the only living thing visible from that far away.
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The Great Barrier Reef is an important ecosystem in and of itself. It hosts more coral than anywhere else in the world (more than 400 different kinds) and is home for more than 1,500 species of tropical fish. There are even 20 types of reptiles living on the reef.
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Unfortunately, the Great Barrier Reef faces some tough environmental threats. Scientists observing the reef say that coral coverage has fallen by almost 50% from 1985 to 2012. Some factors include coral bleaching, invasive species and tropical cyclones.
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While Australia itself is an island, it is also surrounded by more than 8,000 other islands that fall within its maritime borders.
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Among liberal democracies, Australia stands apart as the only one with no formal bill of rights.
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Australia owns the largest portion of Antarctica, with Argentina, Chile, France, New Zealand, Norway and the United Kingdom also owning pieces.
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Melbourne was nearly named “Batmania” as a tribute to John Batman, one of the city’s founders.
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A single cattle station in Australia, the Anna Creek station, is larger than the entire country of Israel. At more than 5.85 million acres, it is the largest working cattle station in the world.
Wikimedia Commons / Kerry_Raymond
Highway 1 is more than 9,000 miles long and rings the entire country. The longest is the Pan American Highway, a series of roadways linking Buenos Aries in South America to Edmonton, Alberta, Canada in North America.
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Australia has the largest feral camel population in the world. In 2009, 6,000 wild camels showed up at Docker River in Australia, searching for water. Camels aren’t indigenous to Australia. They were brought in by settlers in the 19th century and are now considered a menace requiring annual culling in many parts of the country. In some instances, they are used as tourist attractions.
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The original architect behind the Sydney Opera House, Jorn Utzon, resigned after the government refused to pay him during the project. He never returned to Australia. The structure was ultimately completed by an Australian architectural team headed up by Peter Hall.
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The Australian national science agency, CSIRO, is adamant that it invented part of the technology behind Wi-Fi and even sues companies using the technology without a license.
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Behind Athens and Thessaloniki, Melbourne, Australia, has the largest Greek-speaking population in the world.
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Australia has a lot of snakes, 140 different snake species, to be exact. Out of the 25 deadliest snakes in the world, 20 live in Australia.
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If you order a burger in Australia, you will almost certainly get pickled beets on it. Australians almost always put “beet root” on their burgers and sometimes add a pineapple slice and a fried egg.
bhofack2 / istockphoto
Australia’s koalas are in dire straits, suffering two decades of population losses and earning classification as a threatened species. While bushfires are believed to have further decimated populations, especially in New South Wales, chlamydia has played a huge factor in reducing population numbers over the years. Roughly half of Australia’s koalas are believed to be infected with chlamydia.
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Another species, Tasmanian devils, have also been under threat from a disease. Devil Facial Tumour Disease, a transmittable cancer, has been found by researchers to actually be less dire than previously thought as devils’ immune systems are actually changing to fight the disease.
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Mount Wingen, commonly referred to as Burning Mountain, has been burning for more than 6,000 years because of a coal seam. Even stranger, the seam moves about one meter every year, meaning that the smoldering coal has moved about 6.5 kilometers in the past 6,000 years.
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There is a pink lake in Australia. Lake Hillier is bright pink, and scientists have no idea why.
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Just outside Sydney lay four abandoned freighter ships in a contaminated former trading port. One of the ships, the SS Ayrfield, now boasts a forest of mangrove trees that have miraculously sprouted from the wreckage.
mezuni (Jason Baker)
Leatherwood honey is considered one of the finest and rarest honeys in the world, and is a distinctly Australian delicacy. It’s also incredibly difficult to produce. The leatherwood trees themselves need 70 years to reach maturity and even then the bees who feed on them have to be brought in via helicopter to reach stretches of inaccessible forest where the trees grow.
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Among Australia’s many interesting critters are honeypot ants, which carry an entire community’s emergency food supply on their tiny backs. They engorge themselves with nectar until they swell to the size of grapes.
Greg Hume at en.wikipedia
There’s no chance you’ll get hungry while voting in Australia. During Australian elections, you will often find “democracy sausages” outside polling places. They’re often offered for free or for a small fee to help raise money for local causes.
Wikimedia Commons / Kerry Raymond
In Australia, a “goon sack” is a four liter inflatable bag for wine (often called a wine bladder in the United States and other parts of the world). But Australians use the bags for far more than wine, turning them into pillows, rafts and more.
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A railroad tunnel built in the 1880s in Helensburgh, New South Wales, and since abandoned has become a tourist attraction because of a colony of glowworms who moved in and made it their home. Now, the worms illuminate the tunnel in blue and green.
Philip Terry Graham
Magnetic Hill, near the townships of Pekina and Peterborough in rural South Australia, is truly strange. If you drive up the hill, then set your car in neutral, instead of rolling back down, you will roll uphill thanks to a combination of strange topographic anomalies.
Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons
Many people have a phobia of Australia’s venomous spiders, but spiders rank below snakes, sharks and even bees in terms of how many times they’ve actually killed someone.
But the Sydney funnel-web, shown here, is considered the deadliest spider in Australia (and maybe the world) because of its highly toxic venom and large fangs.
Wikimedia Commons / Doug Beckers
Australia has many poisonous plants, including stinging trees that grow in rainforests in Queensland. The Dendrocnide moroides, commonly called Gympie Gympie, is a member of the nettle family, and you want to avoid touching it at all costs. One victim described it as “the worst pain you can imagine — like being burnt with hot acid and electrocuted at the same time.”
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Australia’s biodiversity is so vast and complex that about 75% of it remains unknown, according to government agencies.
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In 2009, when a colony of about 120 endangered penguins were threatened by foxes, Australia used snipers to protect the colony.
Dgwildlife / istockphoto
Australia found a way to harness the motion of the ocean to create a zero-emission energy station, the CETO 5.
Wikimedia Commons / Sudeep J Shivashattar
Coober Pedy is a truly unique place. The temperature swings are so extreme — freezing in winter, scorching in summer — that people live primarily underground. So why bother? It’s Australia’s opal capital. With more than 70 opal mines, it’s the largest opal mining area in the world.
The aboriginal name Coober Pedy translates to “white man underground” in English.
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Remember how we said earlier Aussies put beets and pineapple on their burgers? Well, pineapple isn’t just for burgers. It’s also the second most popular type of pizza, right behind Margherita. We haven’t seen any beet pizzas … yet.
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It turns out Australia once had giant flying turkeys? Scientists found the bones of the unusual turkeys in 2017.
This article was produced and syndicated by MediaFeed.org.
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Featured Image Credit: zetter/istockphoto.
