Travel between care visits is working time for the National Living Wage. An hourly rate paid only for time in clients' homes can fall below £12.71 once that travel is counted.
Regulation 34 of the National Minimum Wage Regulations 2015 treats travelling for the purposes of work as working time. Travel between home and the first place of work does not count. GOV.UK's guidance gives the example of "a care worker driving from one client to another between appointments", and HMRC's minimum wage manual says travel "includes the time a worker spends travelling between assignments".
A care worker aged 21 or over does 20 hours of visits in a week and spends 5 hours travelling between them. The agency pays £13.50 for each hour of visits and nothing for travel.
The minimum wage test divides the pay for a pay reference period by the hours that count in it (regulation 7). A visit rate above £12.71 covers unpaid travel only while the average across all counted hours stays at or above the rate. In the example the average is £10.80 an hour.
The Care and support statutory guidance tells councils that pay must be enough to meet the minimum wage, and that this "includes appropriate remuneration for any time spent travelling between appointments" (paragraph 4.30). A cost case for a council rate can set out the travel hours behind each contact hour.
Some councils pay for contact time only. Bury Council pays its framework home care providers on actual contact time: if a one-hour call is completed in 80% of the time, the provider receives 80% of the hourly rate.
We record travel between visits in payroll, run the minimum wage test for every pay period, and work out the hourly rate your home care contracts need once travel is included.
No. Regulation 34 excludes travel between the worker's home and a place of work.
Yes. If travel between visits is unpaid, the average pay across all hours that count can fall below the minimum wage, as in the example of £10.80 an hour.
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