Sleep-In and Travel Pay for Care Workers 2026

Sleep-in shifts: how they are paid

A sleep-in is the overnight shift in residential care where the carer sleeps on the premises — in a staff room or a spare bedroom — in case a resident needs help during the night. It is paid as a fixed payment per night on top of the day's shift pay: in practice often somewhere between about £40 and £75 a night, though it varies widely by employer, and that range is a typical market figure, not an ONS one.

The pattern that produces is distinctive to care homes. A carer might work a 12-hour day shift at £13.45 — £161.40 — then sleep in for a £55 fixed payment, then work the next morning. The day's pay is £216.40 for being on site from 8am to 8am, with the night's sleep counting as rest rather than work for pay purposes.

The fixed payment is taxable earnings like any other wages: income tax, National Insurance and pension apply to it. When you run your pay through the take-home calculator, add the year's sleep-in payments into the gross — they are not tax-free, and leaving them out understates both the gross and the deductions.

What the Supreme Court said about sleep-ins

The legal question — are the asleep hours 'time work' for minimum-wage purposes? — went all the way to the Supreme Court in Royal Mencap Society v Tomlinson-Blake [2021] UKSC 8. The answer was no: a care worker on a sleep-in shift is not doing time work while asleep, even though they are required to be on the premises. Only time actually spent awake for the purposes of working counts toward the minimum wage.

That is why a £55 sleep-in covering eight hours of sleep is lawful even though £55 divided by eight is well below the £12.71 hourly floor — the eight hours are not time work, so the hourly floor does not apply to them. But the ruling cuts both ways: if the carer is woken at 3am to settle a distressed resident and spends 45 minutes doing so, those 45 minutes are time work and must be paid at no less than the minimum wage rate for the pay period as a whole.

The Employment Rights Act 2025 creates a Fair Pay Agreement mechanism for adult social care — sector-wide pay bargaining, expected around April 2028 — which may change what sleep-ins are worth in future. It does not overturn the Mencap ruling: the distinction between asleep and awake-for-work stands unless and until new law replaces it.

Travel time between visits: the Reg 20 rule

Domiciliary care runs on travel: from one client's home to the next, all day, every day. Regulation 20 of the National Minimum Wage Regulations 2015 says that time spent travelling between appointments in the course of work counts as working time for minimum-wage purposes. The drive from home to the first client of the day and from the last client back home is commuting — it does not count — but everything in between does.

What this means in practice is a two-step test on the pay period. Step one: add up all the pay — contact time, any paid travel time, sleep-ins, premiums. Step two: add up all the working time — contact time plus the between-visit travel. Divide the first by the second. If the result is below £12.71 an hour, the minimum wage has not been paid, however the employer structured the visit rates.

Employers handle this in different ways. Some pay travel time separately at the hourly rate; some roll an allowance for it into the visit rate; some pay mileage instead of time. All of those are lawful structures — what matters is the result of the two-step test, not the structure. If an employer pays per visit and ignores the gaps, the test is where it gets caught.

The visit maths: a day with six calls

Take a domiciliary carer on the £13.45 ONS median doing six 45-minute visits in a day. Contact time: 4.5 hours. Contact pay: £60.53. Now add the travel the Reg 20 rule counts — say 15 minutes between each visit, 1.25 hours across the day. Working time for minimum-wage purposes: 5.75 hours. Effective hourly rate: £60.53 divided by 5.75, or £10.53 — below the £12.71 legal floor.

That is the tripwire. The contact rate of £13.45 looks safely above the minimum wage; the day's real rate, once the travel the law counts is included, is not. The employer in this example must make up the difference somehow — paid travel time, a higher visit rate, or a top-up — because the two-step test is done on the pay period, not on the visit.

The arithmetic scales with the gaps. Rural rounds with 20-minute drives between villages are where the tripwire bites hardest; tight urban rounds with five-minute hops mostly clear it. If your round involves real driving, do this calculation on your own week — it takes five minutes and it is the single most useful piece of pay maths a domiciliary carer can do.

• Contact pay: 6 visits × 45 minutes × £13.45 = £60.53
• Working time for NMW: 4.5 contact hours + 1.25 travel hours = 5.75 hours
• Effective rate: £60.53 ÷ 5.75 = £10.53 an hour — below the £12.71 floor
• The shortfall must be made up: paid travel time, a higher visit rate, or a top-up

Mileage: 55p, 25p and the car that costs more

HMRC's approved mileage rates are the tax-free ceiling for business mileage: for 2026/27, 55p a mile for cars and vans for the first 10,000 business miles in the tax year, then 25p a mile after. The 55p rate was raised from 45p on 6 April 2026 — the first change since 2011 — which tells you how long domiciliary carers had been absorbing rising fuel costs at the old rate.

What the employer actually pays varies. Some pay the full approved rate; some pay a lower flat rate per mile; some pay nothing and expect the car to be part of the job. The scale of it: a domiciliary carer doing 100 business miles a week, paid at the approved rate, receives £2,860 a year in mileage — tax-free — which is real money against a £26,227.50 full-time salary.

If the employer pays below the approved rate, the difference is not lost: tax relief can be claimed on the shortfall, which reduces the income tax bill rather than putting cash in the pay packet. Keep a mileage log — dates, clients, miles — because the relief is only as good as the records, and so is any dispute about what was actually driven.

If the numbers look wrong

Start with records, because every route forward needs them. For a fortnight, write down each visit, the contact time, the travel time between visits, any sleep-ins and the miles driven. Then run the two-step test: total pay for the period divided by total working time including between-visit travel. If it clears £12.71, the structure is lawful even if it feels ungenerous; if it does not, there is a minimum-wage issue.

The next step is the employer — many underpayments are rota design rather than policy, and a carer who can show the maths gets further than one who cannot. GOV.UK's minimum wage calculator checks the figures independently. Beyond that, Acas advises on minimum-wage disputes and HMRC enforces the minimum wage: a complaint to HMRC can trigger an investigation of the employer's records, not just yours.

One boundary to keep in mind: this page explains the rules as they stand, verified 24 September 2026. It is not legal advice for a specific dispute, and the Fair Pay Agreement mechanism expected around April 2028 may change the landscape for social care pay. For a live dispute, Acas or an employment adviser sees the details this page cannot.

Where the sleep-in and travel figures come from

The sleep-in position is from the Supreme Court in Royal Mencap Society v Tomlinson-Blake [2021] UKSC 8, via the GOV.UK minimum wage blog: asleep hours on a sleep-in are not 'time work' for National Minimum Wage purposes; only time actually spent awake for the purposes of working counts. The travel-between-appointments rule is Regulation 20 of the National Minimum Wage Regulations 2015.

Mileage rates are HMRC approved rates from GOV.UK: 55p a mile for cars and vans for the first 10,000 business miles in 2026/27 (raised from 45p on 6 April 2026 — first change since 2011), 25p a mile after. The £12.71 National Living Wage floor is from GOV.UK, and the £13.45 contact rate used in the visit-maths examples is the ONS ASHE 2025 provisional median for SOC 6135. The £40–£75 sleep-in nightly range is a typical market range, not ONS data.

Reviewed and updated

The legal position on sleep-ins and travel time, the mileage rates and the worked examples were last reviewed on 24 September 2026. The Fair Pay Agreement mechanism for adult social care under the Employment Rights Act 2025 is expected around April 2028 — this page will be revisited when it lands, since sector-wide bargaining may change what sleep-ins and visit rates are worth.