Care worker timesheets, travel time and payroll

1. Rostered or actual: pick a basis

There are three honest ways to count a carer's hours for a call, and a company should choose one and write it down:

• Scheduled — the rostered length, whether or not the carer checked in. Simple, but it pays for calls nobody attended.
• Rostered on check-in — the rostered length, paid once the carer checked in. This is the common home care position: calls are commissioned in 15, 30, 45 and 60 minute units, the check-in proves delivery, and a carer is not penalised for a client who was ready early.
• Actual — check-in to check-out, to the minute. Precise, and it means a carer who stayed twenty minutes to deal with a fall is paid for it, but it also means the rota and the pay drift apart and the invoice may not match.

Whichever you choose, the timesheet should show all three figures for every call so a query can be answered in one look.

2. Travel time and the minimum wage

For National Minimum Wage purposes, time spent travelling between care calls is working time. A carer's pay for the day, divided by the hours worked including that travel, must not fall below the applicable rate. HMRC has pursued home care providers on exactly this point, and the sums involved can be large because the underpayment repeats across every carer and every day. The commute from home to the first call and from the last call home is generally not working time; the journeys in between are.

The practical consequences:

• The timesheet has to know the journeys, not just the calls, so travel minutes can be counted or paid.
• Travel time should come from real routes by the carer's actual mode of transport. A flat "ten minutes between calls" is neither accurate nor defensible.
• Long gaps that the carer cannot use — waiting in a car between two calls in a village — are a policy decision to make explicitly, and to make in writing.

This guide is not legal advice; check the current rates and guidance from GOV.UK and take advice on your own arrangements.

3. Cancelled calls

A cancelled call raises two separate questions: is the client still invoiced, and is the carer still paid? The answers depend on when it was cancelled and why, and they are decisions someone in the office makes at the time of cancellation. Record them there — on the cancellation itself — so the timesheet and the invoice follow the decision automatically, rather than a payroll clerk guessing from a note three weeks later. A cancelled call should also be able to disappear from the carer's roster and app if the office chooses, without disappearing from the record.

4. Sleep-ins and overnight calls

Following the Supreme Court's 2021 decision in Royal Mencap Society v Tomlinson-Blake, a worker on a sleep-in shift who is permitted to sleep is not working for minimum wage purposes while asleep; only time awake and working counts. Waking nights are working time throughout. Your contracts and pay rates for sleep-ins need to reflect which of the two each arrangement is.

On the rota, an overnight call is one appointment that runs across midnight — 22:00 to 07:00 is nine hours, not minus fifteen. Software that cannot hold a call across midnight will split it, double it or lose it, and the timesheet inherits the error.

5. Mileage and waiting

Mileage between calls is a separate payment from travel time, usually at a per-mile rate, and needs the same real-route distance. Waiting time — the gap between two calls that is too short to go home — is a company policy; whatever you decide, the timesheet should show waiting minutes per day so the decision is applied consistently.

6. The timesheet payroll can trust

The test of a timesheet is that payroll can pay from it without a spreadsheet in between. That means, per carer, per period:

• every call with rostered, actual and paid minutes and its status (delivered, cancelled-paid, cancelled-unpaid, missed);
• travel minutes and mileage per day, from real journeys;
• overnight calls counted correctly across midnight;
• a total the carer has seen on their phone and had the chance to query; and
• an export in the shape the payroll system takes.

7. How Carelo does it

Carelo builds each carer's timesheet from the rota and the check-ins, on the hours basis you set in the company's timesheet policy, with rostered, actual and payable minutes shown for every call. Cancellation decisions — invoice the client, pay the carer, pay mileage, hide from the roster — are recorded on the cancellation and flow to the timesheet and the invoice. Travel, waiting and mileage between consecutive calls are computed from road routes by each carer's mode of travel, and overnight calls run across midnight as one appointment. Carers see their own timesheet in the app; the office exports the period. See timesheets on the features page.