Tax & GST

Car and travel deductions for personal trainers

For a mobile trainer the car is usually the largest deduction that never arrives as a receipt. It's also the one most often claimed wrongly, because what decides it isn't how far you drove or how early you left — it's where you were coming from.

The rule that decides everything

Almost every car question a trainer has comes back to one distinction. Travel between two places you work is part of doing the job, so it's deductible. Travel between home and work is how you get to the job, so it's private.

That's it. The rule doesn't care that you started at 5am, that there's no public transport at that hour, that you were on call, or that your car had your gear in it. Those are all reasons people give for claiming the commute, and none of them change the answer.

Here's a fairly ordinary mobile day, trip by trip.

On that day the deductible kilometres are the middle of it, not the ends. That's the shape of almost every mobile trainer's week, and it's why claiming "everything I drove" is both the most common approach and the wrong one.

The two exceptions

There are two situations where a trip that starts or ends at home can be deductible. Both are real, both are narrower than people assume, and both live or die on records.

1. Your home is a genuine base of business

If your business genuinely operates from your home, travel from home to a client can be travel between two places of work rather than a commute. The test is about where the work of the business actually starts.

Doing your invoices at the kitchen table on a Sunday night does not make your home a base of business. Neither does keeping kettlebells in the garage, on its own. What points towards it is the business having no other fixed location, a part of the home genuinely set aside and used for the business, clients coming to you there, and the work of the day genuinely beginning at home rather than at the venue.

This is one of the more contested claims a sole trader can make, and it is worth being blunt about that. If a meaningful part of your deduction rests on it, have your agent confirm it and write down the facts you're relying on now — not in three years when someone asks. More on working from home →

2. You're carrying bulky, essential equipment

The second exception is for carrying equipment, and it has three conditions. All three have to hold:

• The gear is genuinely bulky. Awkward and heavy enough that transporting it is a real burden. A gym bag with bands and a foam roller is not bulky.
• It's essential to the session, not merely convenient or preferred.
• There is nowhere secure to store it at the venue.

That last one is where most claims fall over. If the gym gives you a locker or a cupboard and you cart the sled home anyway because you'd rather have it with you, the exception doesn't apply. Keep a note of what you carried and why it couldn't be left there. The point is being able to describe the load convincingly long after you've forgotten the day.

Cents per kilometre: the method most trainers use

You pick a set rate per business kilometre and multiply. No fuel receipts, no servicing invoices, no depreciation schedule.

Three things about that rate are worth understanding properly.

It covers everything. Fuel, servicing, tyres, registration, insurance and depreciation are all inside the rate. You can't claim any of them separately on top. Parking and tolls sit outside it, because they're not running costs of the car.

The cap is per car, per income year. Not per client, not per method, and not a limit on how far you're allowed to drive — a limit on how far this method will carry you. Drive 9,000 business kilometres and cents-per-kilometre will only ever claim 5,000 of them.

It's an income tax method only. A claimed kilometre carries no GST credit, so it never appears on your BAS as a kilometre figure. That does not mean your car is invisible for GST — if you're registered you can still claim credits on the actual car costs you hold tax invoices for, apportioned to business use. The two systems are worked out separately. How BAS works for trainers →

The logbook method

The logbook gives you a business-use percentage, and you apply that percentage to what the car actually cost you for the year — fuel, servicing, tyres, registration, insurance, interest if it's financed, and depreciation.

What it takes:

• Twelve continuous weeks of recorded trips, in a period that fairly represents your normal year. Twelve weeks over Christmas will not.
• Odometer readings at the start and end of the logbook period, and at the start and end of each income year you use it.
• Each business journey: date, start and finish odometer readings, kilometres, and the reason for the trip. "Work" is not a reason. "Studio to client, Rose Bay" is.
• Records of the actual running costs you're claiming the percentage of.

Fuel and oil are the limited exception on receipts — they can generally be worked out from odometer readings rather than kept invoice by invoice. Everything else you keep. There's also a cap on the cost of a car you can depreciate, and it moves from year to year, so check the current figure rather than assuming the whole purchase price is in play.

The upside: one logbook is good for five years, provided your pattern of use doesn't change materially. Twelve weeks of discipline once, then four years of odometer readings and receipts. Buy a different car and you start a new logbook.

Which method suits which trainer

If you're mobile — clients across three or four suburbs, a boot full of gear, driving most of the working day — you are likely to be past 5,000 business kilometres, which is the point at which the cap starts limiting what cents-per-kilometre can return. Start a logbook in a normal twelve-week stretch, and do it now rather than in June, because a logbook can't be created retrospectively.

If you're studio-based — one venue, clients come to you — your travel claim is genuinely small, and cents-per-kilometre with an honest log is the sensible answer. The bigger risk for you isn't choosing the wrong method, it's quietly claiming the commute.

There is no honest break-even kilometre figure to give. Once you pass 5,000 kilometres, cents-per-kilometre stops growing and the logbook doesn't. Whether the logbook actually produces a bigger deduction still depends on what your particular car costs to run and how high the business percentage comes out. A cheap, efficient, mostly-private car and an expensive, thirsty, mostly-business one land in very different places. Run both numbers with your agent once, then stop thinking about it.

Travel that isn't your car

Public transport and rideshare between clients follow the same rule as driving. Between two places you work, deductible. Home to the first one, private. Keep the fare receipt or the trip history in the app.

Parking and tolls incurred on a deductible trip are deductible for income tax, and they're claimed separately rather than being absorbed into the cents-per-kilometre rate. They sit outside the GST system in Momentum's default treatment, so no credit is claimed on them unless you change it. If a car park or toll operator gives you a tax invoice showing GST, check that treatment with your agent before you let the default stand. Parking all day at the venue you normally work from is private, on the same logic as the commute — it's the cost of getting to work.

Flights, accommodation and travel costs for an interstate course generally follow the course. Where the course itself is deductible as maintaining or improving the skills you already earn income from, the cost of getting there usually is too. Tack three days at the beach onto the end and the private part has to be apportioned out. Keep the course confirmation and the itinerary — with travel, the purpose of the trip is the entire argument, and it's the thing that's hardest to reconstruct later. Longer trips away also trigger additional travel-diary requirements, so check what applies before you book.

What to write down, and when

Everything on this page eventually reduces to one habit: record the trip on the day, with a reason. Whichever method you use, the deduction is only ever as good as the record behind it, and the record is only ever accurate if it's made close to the event.

• Log the trip the day it happens — date, kilometres, from where, to where, why.
• Keep records for five years from the date you lodge the return they support.
• Note the odometer at 30 June each year if there's any chance you'll move to a logbook. It costs ten seconds and you can't go back for it.
• Decide the home-base question once, deliberately, with your agent — not trip by trip depending on how the week went.
• Keep parking and toll receipts with the trip they belong to, so the two make sense together years later.

The full deduction checklist for personal trainers →

Common questions