Travel time is part of the cost of every home care visit. Employers are legally required to pay caregivers for it, so it shows up in your rate one way or another. Here's how we handle it, including the tricky cases where clients live far from the nearest city.
Standard Travel Time
For a typical visit in or near a city, we build travel into the service without adding charges. Hourly visits include 15 minutes of travel pulled from the visit duration. Overnight visits include up to 30 minutes of round-trip travel at no charge. Live-in services include up to 2 hours of round-trip travel per caregiver changeover at no charge.
Remote hourly visits work differently. The visit duration equals task time plus round-trip travel from the nearest populated centre. That keeps rural service possible and fair to the caregiver.
Hourly Service in Remote Areas
When a client lives outside a city centre, we structure the visit so the caregiver's drive is covered. A few real examples make this concrete.
A client who needs a 10 minute medication check and lives 50 minutes round-trip from the nearest city gets a 1 hour visit. This makes the service both possible and cost effective, especially when multiple visits per day are needed. A client who needs 1 hour of care and lives 1 hour round-trip from town needs a 2 hour visit to make things sustainable.
Once the distance gets extreme, hourly service stops making sense. A client needing 2 hours of care who lives 8 hours round-trip away would require a 10 hour visit. We can do it, but we'd rather talk through alternatives like live-in service, local resources, or a different care setup. Overnight service within 30 minutes of a city centre doesn't need any added travel time.
Live-in Service in Remote Areas
For clients several hours from the nearest city, live-in is often the only feasible option. Live-in caregivers are expected to travel up to an hour each way on their own time as the normal cost of getting to work. Anything beyond that has to be built in.
If the residence is within an hour of a main city centre, live-in service carries no added travel cost. For places like Gold River, Tofino, and similar communities, we add travel time for anything past the 2 hour round-trip threshold. If the trip requires a ferry, toll road, or similar expense, that gets added to the invoice at cost.
Inclement weather occasionally eats into visit time, usually because of snowfall, but this is rare on the Island.