Most care workers drive their own cars between visits, pay for the fuel themselves and claim it back later. In fact, the proportion of carers that drive their own cars at work is as high as 80% according to the Homecare Association’s 2026 fuel survey.
On the National Living Wage of £12.71 an hour, a £40 tank is more than three hours’ pay, and if claims go in once a month and are paid with the next payroll, that £40 can be out of a carer’s account for a month or more.
Providers are well aware of this. In the same survey, 27% had given cash advances to carers who couldn’t otherwise afford the fuel to get to work. And advances are a sign that repayment is taking too long.
The problem is the wait, not the amount
There are two separate questions to consider about mileage: how much you pay back per mile, and how long it takes to pay it. They tend to get muddled because they both show up on the same payslip line, but they’re fundamentally different issues.
The first is a policy decision, and one where many providers still pay below the HMRC approved rate. In this article we’ll explore the second one: how long it takes to pay employees back.
With the right process in place, the wait can be cut from weeks to days without changing the rate you pay or the funding you receive. Even if the rate stays exactly the same, that quicker reimbursement can make a massive difference to the carers who are out of pocket.
Why isn’t this a funding problem?
Money is tight everywhere in care, so it’s natural to put faster reimbursement to the back of the priority queue. But ultimately the wait is caused by how claims move through the organisation. Many organisations do the following:
- Collect claims on paper, once a month
- Keyed in figures by hand
- Leave approvals sitting in an inbox waiting to be chased
- Use a single month-end payment run that everything has to wait for
All of these can be rectified through better processes.
How to shorten the cycle without changing the budget
Aim to speed up each step in the process individually. That means getting staff to submit costs the day they spend them, calculating claims and sending them for approval automatically, and running payments weekly rather than once a month.
This is how reimbursements are set up in Moss. Carers submit from their phone, the claim is calculated at your rate and routed to the right approver, and payout runs as often as you choose. Moss doesn’t decide the rate you pay, but it does shorten the time between a carer spending money and getting it back.
Paid back before it becomes a grievance
With that process in place, the carer who fronted £40 of fuel, which could be three hours of their pay, submits the claim from their phone the day they spend it. It’s approved that week and paid days later, not a month or more later. They still drive their own car and still pay for the fuel first, but they’re no longer out of pocket long enough for it to become a grievance, and finance isn’t running everything through one month-end batch.
For a sector that struggles to keep staff, shortening the wait is one of the few changes that needs no new funding and that carers notice immediately.
