Claiming kilometres on an NDIS invoice, and why the units confuse everyone

Travel is the line that looks simplest and is claimed wrongly most often. Part of that is a genuine oddity in how the NDIS prices it: the item costs a dollar, the rate is 99 cents, and neither number means what it looks like.

The item has no price limit

Start here, because it explains everything else.

Provider travel is one of a small set of supports not subject to a price limit. The $1.00 is a notional unit price. It sits in a part of the 2026-27 schedule literally titled "Notional Unit Priced Items", alongside things like ramps and bathroom modifications, which obviously do not cost a dollar either.

Why the price says $1.00, and what notional actually means

Provider travel has no real per-kilometre price the NDIA could fix nationally — costs vary with the vehicle, the trip, the region. Rather than leave the item unpriced, the schedule gives it a placeholder: a notional unit worth exactly $1.00, so the quantity field can carry the real cost instead of the price field. It is bookkeeping to make a variable cost fit a fixed-price schedule, not a rate anyone actually charges.

That placeholder matters for exactly one step: the payment request lodged with the NDIA. The Pricing Arrangements document says a support priced this way should be claimed by reference to the notional unit price, and works through a sibling item priced the same way, Activity Based Transport:

If... the non-labour costs of the activity based transport was $21.50... the provider would submit a payment request for 21.5 units at $1.00 a unit for a total cost of $21.50.

Provider travel is priced identically and points back to that same rule, so the mechanism carries across: whatever actually gets lodged with the NDIA for this item is denominated in dollars, not kilometres.

Your invoice to the participant or plan manager is a different document, and does not need to be written this way. The same Pricing Arrangements document's own worked example for provider travel itself uses the ordinary form:

$46.80 for the 60 kilometres travel to and from the participant against support item 01_799_0104_1_1

Kilometres and a rate, the same way Kygra Care writes it — that code is a sibling of 01_799_0107_1_1, the same non-labour travel item claimed against a different support category. If a plan manager pays your invoice, turning it into whatever the NDIA's payment system needs is part of their job when they lodge the claim. If you lodge claims yourself through the myplace Provider Portal, the notional-unit figure is the one place it actually applies.

The 99 cents is negotiated, not automatic

The rules do not set a travel rate. They say a provider may negotiate with the participant for a reasonable contribution towards costs, and then say what the NDIA would consider reasonable:

For a vehicle owned by the provider or the worker, up to $0.99 a kilometre; and for other forms of transport or associated costs, such as road tolls, parking, public transport fares, up to the full amount.

So 99 cents is the top of a range, and it needs to be agreed with the participant and written into your service agreement rather than assumed. The NDIA's own worked examples use 78 cents and 85 cents a kilometre, which are perfectly valid agreed rates. Tolls and parking are separate from the per-kilometre figure and can be claimed in full.

Figures as at 10 August 2026.

Driving to them, versus driving them

These are two different rules and it is worth knowing which one you are in.

If you drive a wheelchair-accessible vehicle and you are transporting the participant as part of their support, the higher figure is the one to be negotiating from. That rate does not apply to your commute to their place.

The conditions that get travel knocked back

Travel time and travel costs are gated together. You can only claim the non-labour cost where the rules would let you claim for travel time on that support. If travel time is not claimable there, the kilometres are not either.

It has to be claimed separately. The travel line is its own claim, kept apart from the support it relates to and from any travel-time claim. Rolling it into the support total is a rejection.

Not if travel is already built in. Where a support item already includes travel costs, you cannot claim travel on top of it.

Sharing a trip means splitting the cost. If you are seeing several participants in one region on one run, apportion the kilometres, including the return leg, between them, and agree it in advance rather than afterwards.

Itemise per date, not per month. A single monthly kilometre total is the classic knocked-back travel line, because nothing connects it to the supports it came from. Worth being straight about the status of this one: it is what plan managers in practice require, reported consistently by working providers, rather than a rule we can point to in the pricing documents. Record kilometres against the date and the shift as you go, and the question never arises.

Checking your own shift

The Kygra Care shift rate checker works out the line items and rates for a shift you enter, so the support your travel attaches to is priced correctly before the kilometres go anywhere near it. It is free and needs no login.