Civil legal aid caps an expert's travel time at £40 an hour and vehicle mileage at 45p a mile. Those figures are published in regulations, they sit below the £54.40 assessment rate for an occupational therapist, and almost no allied health content cites them.
For a profession that spends a great deal of its working life driving between home visits, schools and case conferences, that is a surprising gap. Here is what the numbers are and how to use them.
Where do the figures come from?
Schedule 5 to the Civil Legal Aid (Remuneration) Regulations 2013, the same schedule that sets expert hourly rates.
It states, in terms, that the maximum the Lord Chancellor may pay as a disbursement for an expert's travel time is £40 per hour, and for an expert's vehicle mileage £0.45 per mile.
Two things follow that are more useful than the numbers themselves.
Travel time is billable. The regulations assume it, which settles the "should I charge at all" question. In publicly funded work you can, and the rate is published.
It is billed below the working rate. £40 against £54.40 for assessment. That establishes the convention: travel is chargeable, and it is chargeable at a discount, because you are not doing skilled work while driving.
Do these figures bind private work?
No. They are caps on public funds.
For privately instructed work you set your own rate. Published private OT terms commonly show travel time at £30 or £50 an hour and mileage at 45p, which brackets the legal aid figure rather than following it.
But the structure is worth borrowing, because it is defensible: a travel rate below your clinical rate, plus mileage, both stated in advance.
Careful: two different mileage figures
This trips people up, and the answer is that both are correct for different purposes.
| Figure | What it is | Where it applies |
|---|---|---|
| 45p per mile | Legal aid disbursement cap | Publicly funded expert work, under Schedule 5 |
| 55p per mile | HMRC Approved Mileage Allowance Payment, 2026/27, first 10,000 miles | Tax-free reimbursement and self-employed simplified expenses |
The HMRC rate rose to 55p for 2026/27, the first change since 2011. The legal aid cap is a separate instrument and has not moved with it.
So if you do a mix of legal aid and private work you may legitimately be using two different mileage figures in the same month. That is not an inconsistency to tidy up. It reflects two regimes.
For the tax side, our guide to SLT school travel billing covers the HMRC rates in more detail, and the same rates apply to any self-employed practitioner.
How should you structure travel charges?
Four decisions, made once and written into your terms.
A free radius, or not. Many practitioners absorb travel within a set distance of base, commonly 5 to 15 miles, and charge beyond it. It simplifies local work and it prices honestly for distant work.
Time, mileage, or both. Charging mileage only means giving away the hours. Charging time only ignores the cost of running the vehicle. Most sustainable structures charge both.
A discount on time, or full rate. Below your clinical rate is the convention and the easier sell.
A cap for very long journeys. A four-hour round trip for a one-hour assessment is an economic problem for both sides, and a stated cap or a minimum booking is fairer than an invoice nobody expected.
The thing that saves more than the rate
Routing.
Two assessments in the same town on the same day is one journey. Four assessments spread across a county on four separate days is four journeys, and no travel rate rescues that.
For a mobile OT the scheduling decision is usually worth more than the billing decision. Cluster geographically, batch home visits by area, and hold a standing slot for the parts of your patch that are furthest away rather than travelling there on demand.
What to put in your terms
Six lines, and it prevents almost every dispute.
- Your free radius, if you have one
- Your mileage rate, and which one applies to publicly funded work
- Your travel time rate, and how it relates to your clinical rate
- How travel is calculated, from base or from your previous appointment
- Any minimum booking for distant visits
- When travel is not charged, if you absorb it in some circumstances
Point four causes more arguments than the rest combined. "From base" and "from my last appointment" produce very different numbers on a busy day, and clients reasonably assume whichever is cheaper.
Track it properly
Mileage is a deductible business expense whether or not you recharge it, and a contemporaneous log is what makes the deduction stand up.
Record the date, the journey, the purpose and the miles, at the time rather than reconstructed at year end from a diary. If you also recharge travel to clients, the same log is your billing evidence, which is a good reason to keep one record rather than two.
The short version
Charge for travel. Charge at a discount to your clinical rate. Put mileage and time in your terms separately, state where the mileage is measured from, and remember there are two legitimate mileage figures depending on who is paying.
Then spend the rest of your attention on the diary, because the route saves more than the rate.
This is general information about billing and tax practice, not financial advice. Legal aid rates and HMRC rates are set separately and change independently. Confirm current figures before relying on them and take advice on your own tax position.
Sources: Civil Legal Aid (Remuneration) Regulations 2013, Schedule 5 · HMRC travel, mileage and fuel rates and allowances
Related: How much should an OT charge for reports versus sessions? · Case manager or expert witness? · Should you bill schools for travel time as an SLT?
