How Home Health Mileage Reimbursement Actually Helps HHC Companies

Over 10 million Americans receive home healthcare services for a wide range of needs, from post-surgery recovery and chronic illness management to hospice care and daily living assistance. For these patients, quality care means a knock at the door. For the companies coordinating that care, how they handle home health mileage reimbursement has a bigger impact on their operations than many realize. 

Delivering home healthcare is both physically demanding and logistically complex. Home healthcare workers spend a sizable portion of their working hours behind the wheel, driving in their personal vehicles from patient to patient across towns, suburbs, and rural routes. All that mileage adds up fast. What your organization does about those miles shapes more than just your expense reports.

If your company doesn’t have a formal plan for home health mileage reimbursement in place, or if your current approach is informal and consistent, you’re probably leaving value on the table in more ways than one. 

In this article, we’ll break down what a proper program looks like, what that does for your business, and how the right tools make it manageable at scale. 

The Basics of Home Health Mileage Reimbursement

Mileage reimbursement refers to payments dispensed to mobile employees for work-related driving, based on the number of miles they drove. Each year, the IRS announces a standard mileage rate (for 2026, it’s 72.5 cents per mile driven) that taxpayers can use to determine the cost of a reimbursement. 

Reimbursements are rendered accountable (ie: nontaxable) if they follow the IRS standards for an accountable plan. This plan requires that reimbursements meet these conditions:

• The trip must have a provable business purpose. While trips between business locations (such as driving from one patient’s home to another) count, commutes and side or personal trips do not. 
• Workers must provide documentation, usually in the form of a mileage log, that shows the time, date, location, and business purpose of each trip. This documentation must be provided to the employer within a reasonable timeframe (30 days is preferable; 60 days is allowable.) 
• If the reimbursement exceeds the employee’s actual expenses, the employee must return the excess amount within 120 days. 

There is no federal law that says you have to reimburse mileage at the IRS standard mileage rate. In fact, there’s no federal law requiring mileage reimbursement at all, although the states of California, Massachusetts, and Illinois all do legally require employers to reimburse employees for mileage. Even if you aren’t legally required to issue a home health mileage reimbursement, it’s still a good policy to have a mileage reimbursement program in place.

How Mileage Reimbursement Helps HHC Companies 

Reduces Risk

There’s no law requiring mileage reimbursement (in 47 states), but failing to appropriately compensate employees for this expense could have serious consequences. 

For example, if you have employees who work at or near the minimum wage and you don’t reimburse their travel, you run the risk of violating the Fair Labor Standards Act, or FLSA. According to the FLSA’s ‘kickback rule,’  if an employee’s out-of-pocket expenses bring their take-home pay under minimum wage, a wage and hour issue is created. 

There have been several class-action lawsuits in the past on this very issue. In a recent case, a Pizza Hut franchisee agreed to pay out $4.75M to resolve a class-action lawsuit filed in 2023 by a Georgia delivery driver. That suit represented over 1000 drivers from Florida, Georgia, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Wisconsin. 

The cost (and reputational fallout) of dealing with possible lawsuits will ultimately be much more expensive than simply providing a proper home health mileage reimbursement to your aides.

Save Money

If you aren’t reimbursing mileage, but you have recognized that your HHC staff should be compensated in some way for their travel, you may have turned to other solutions such as a car allowance or investing in company cars. 

A car allowance is a set amount that you give to your employees to cover a period of time. It’s intended to cover typical costs of owning a vehicle, such as maintenance, wear-and-tear, insurance, fuel and depreciation. It doesn’t vary based on how much an employee actually drives, which means it will inevitably overpay some employees and underpay others. 

Company vehicles give employers more control and can be an attractive perk, but they come with significant fixed costs and liability exposure that make them impractical for most HHC organizations.

Mileage reimbursement sidesteps both of these problems. Because home health mileage reimbursement scales directly with actual business travel, it’s fair to employees and financially predictable for employers. 

Reveal Insights

When you start providing mileage reimbursements, they come with the benefit of learning the routines of your workers. How many patients does each aide visit in a day? How long does a typical visit last? What routes are they taking between stops? A structured program captures all of this as a matter of course. 

That visibility gives leadership something to act on. Reimbursement records can surface insufficient routes, geographic gaps in college, and scheduling patterns that burn unnecessary miles – and point toward changes that benefit both aides and patients.  

Challenges in Managing Home Health Mileage Reimbursement

Even HHC organizations that recognize the value of a home health mileage reimbursement program often struggle to run one well. The job itself creates conditions that can make reimbursement unusually difficult to manage, and those difficulties can compound with the size of the company.

Accountability Problems

The most common approach to mile tracking is the manual mileage log. Using this method, employees record odometer readings, note the relevant details for each trip, and submit expense reports at the end of each pay period. 

Manual logging is simple in theory, but it’s a process built entirely on self-reporting. There’s no way to independently verify the claimed mileage, no way to confirm that a trip was work-related, and no check on what route that employee took. 

Manual entry also makes calculation errors, rounded-up or estimated mileage totals, and the inclusion of ineligible travel all-too-easy. Those small accuracies add up over time into meaningful overpayments. 

As patient loads increase, all these issues intensify. A home health aide visiting a half-dozen patients a day generates a high volume of trips, and each of those trips needs to be logged accurately. The more trips, the more entries; the more entries, the more opportunity for error, and the harder it gets for administrators to review submissions and catch mistakes. 

HIPAA compliance

HHC companies face a layer of complexity that most industries don’t; mileage data is patient-adjacent. Trip records can reveal which patients an aide visited, how often, and for how long. That makes home health mileage reimbursement a HIPAA concern along with a payroll one.

HIPAA, also known as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, dictates that providers and workers within the healthcare industry must maintain the privacy of patients’ protected health information, or PHI. PHI consists of medical records and any other “individually identifiable” data (names, addresses, etc.).

Any system used to collect, store, or process that data needs to meet federal security standards, Unfortunately, many general-purpose expense tools aren’t built with healthcare compliance in mind. Companies who try to handle home health mileage reimbursement with manual logs or mileage spreadsheets may be creating exposure they haven’t accounted for.

Process Gaps and Admin Burden 

Manual reimbursement also creates process problems. Without a set and standardized workflow, expense reports get submitted inconsistently, reviewed irregularly, and paid whenever, instead of on a predictable schedule. Employees aren’t always clear on who to submit reports to or who to ask for help. 

When that happens, the burden of all that confusion and disorganization falls onto administrators. Admins then have to spend their valuable time chasing down incomplete logs, reconciling discrepancies, and checking for errors. And every hour spent on mileage reimbursement logs is an hour not spent on patient care operations, staffing, or planning. 

Scale Makes it Worse 

Home health care tends to be a high-volume, geographically distributed business. Hundreds of workers making multiple trips daily across wide service areas produce a substantial amount of transactions for a home health mileage reimbursement program. Manual processes that are merely inconvenient at a small scale become genuinely unmanageable at a large scale. 

How Software Bridges the Gap

As we said above, the real challenges of managing home health mileage reimbursement are process problems. The right tools, in the form of mileage reimbursement software, directly address those problems. Why waste time making workers manually document trips and administrators manually verify them, when purpose-built software can automate everything smoothly, quickly, and accurately?

Let’s take a look at what dedicated mileage reimbursement software tools can bring to your home health mileage reimbursement processes.

Streamlined Workflows

Mileage software does away with the process gaps and bottlenecks that make manual reimbursement a time-consuming slog, and replaces them with standardized workflows. Submissions follow a defined path, approvals happen in sequence, and reimbursements reach payroll without someone having to manually shepherd them through. It becomes a predictable process for everyone involved, regardless of how many workers are in the field on a given day. 

HIPAA Compliance and Data Security

Cyberattacks frequently target healthcare organizations, and the data generated by a home health mileage reimbursement program is not outside that risk. A breach involving trip records exposes the organization to reputational damage, regulatory scrutiny, and potential legal liability. 

HIPAA-compliant mileage software addresses that risk by applying security standards across the full reimbursement workflow, covering how data is stored, transmitted, and accessed at every stage of the approval process. For HHC organizations that have been managing reimbursement informally, that level of protection represents a meaningful reduction in exposure.

EVV Compliance

Under the 21st Century Cures Act, providers offering Personal Care Services and Home Healthcare Services must use Electronic Visit Verification, or EVV. EVV requires that all visits be documented with:

• The type of service provided at each visit
• The individual receiving the service
• The individual providing the service
• The date of the service
• The location the service was delivered
• The start and end time of each visit 

The right mileage reimbursement software helps support EVV compliance because so much of the required information (including location data, timestamps, and visit records) already gets captured as part of standard trip logging. Busy HHC workers don’t need to maintain separate documentation systems for home health care mileage reimbursement and visit verification, because the records get produced either way. 

A Tailored Approach to Mileage Reimbursement 

The miles driven by home healthcare workers every day represent a real business expense. How you manage that expense reaches further than a reimbursement check. 

Having a formal home health mileage reimbursement program protects your company from legal and compliance exposure, and saves time for administrators and supervisors. It also signals to employees that the hard work they do, including all that driving, is valued. 

SureMileage, a secure, HIPAA-compliant mileage reimbursement software by CompanyMileage, helps companies build and sustain that program. SureMileage takes the start and end points for each work-related trip and automatically calculates the best route between them, and from there the amount for reimbursement. This point-to-point calculation method keeps mileage counts accurate and keeps things like calculation errors, duplicated reporting, and ineligible trips out of employee mileage logs. 

At the end of a long day, employees just have to take a few minutes to organize and submit their trips along with any relevant receipts or documentation. To make that process even easier, workers can use our mobile app, SureMobile, to draft and send expense reports right from their smartphones. 

SureMileage integrates seamlessly with point of care software, as well as all major payroll and accounting systems to keep the entire home health care mileage reimbursement process seamless, from trip all the way to payment distribution. 

To learn more about why thousands of HHC companies use SureMileage, and what it can do specifically for your business, reach out to CompanyMileage to book a demo today!

Everyday, home healthcare (HHC) workers rack up miles on the road ensuring that their patients are cared for and their needs are met. But what happens to these miles? Are you reimbursing your employees for their work-related travel? If the answer is no (or yes, but you lack a formal home health mileage reimbursement program), you’re missing out on several key benefits, both for your employees and your organization.

The Basics: Home Health Mileage Reimbursement

A mileage reimbursement is a payment you give to your employees that is calculated based on the number of miles they drove for work. Each year, the IRS announces a standard mileage rate (for 2020, it’s $0.58 per mile), that taxpayers can use to determine the cost of a reimbursement. Employees keep contemporaneous mileage logs of their trips and use these to submit expense reports for each pay period. 

There is no federal law that says you have to reimburse mileage at the IRS standard mileage rate or that you have to reimburse mileage at all. However, some states do have their own laws on the books mandating it. Even if you aren’t legally required to issue a home health mileage reimbursement, it’s still a good policy to have a mileage reimbursement program in place. 

The Many Benefits of Mileage Reimbursement

Reduce Risk

Just because there is not necessarily a law requiring mileage reimbursement, failing to appropriately compensate employees for this expense could have serious consequences. If you don’t pay them at all for work travel, or if you pay them too little, this will put your company at risk of violating labor laws and open you up to litigation. 

For instance, if you have employees who work at or near the minimum wage and you don’t reimburse their travel, these uncompensated expenses could push their wages too low. There have been several class-action lawsuits in the past on this very issue. In one case, Domino’s Pizza delivery drivers were being paid a flat $1 per-delivery fee. They claimed they were being underpaid by $1.30 per delivery and $3.25 per hour.

The cost of dealing with possible lawsuits will ultimately be much more expensive than simply providing a proper home health mileage reimbursement to your aides. 

Save Money

If you aren’t reimbursing mileage, but you have recognized that your HHC staff should be compensated in some way for their travel, you may have turned to other solutions such as a car allowance or investing in company cars. 

A car allowance is a set amount that you give to your employees to cover a period of time; it’s intended to cover typical costs of owning a vehicle, such as maintenance, wear-and-tear, insurance, fuel and depreciation. Factors such as distance traveled for work do not change the amount from month to month. Company cars can be a great perk for potential employees on top of giving you extra control. However, company cars cost a lot of money to maintain and open you up to liability should your vehicles be in an accident.

Unlike other options, mileage reimbursement is completely dependent on how much your employees travel. A car allowance is the same no matter what, and company cars come with fixed costs you’re always responsible for paying. 

If you don’t have a system in place to reimburse mileage for your employees, then you’re basically operating in the wild west. Many employees may not even be aware that you will cover these expenses, and for the ones that do, there aren’t any rules to help the process along. When do they submit expense reports? Who do they go to? Who reviews them to make sure everything checks out? How are employees supposed to fill out mileage logs? Without standardized processes in place, you’re likely losing thousands of dollars each year as people inaccurately document mileage, rounding up or estimating trip distances or including travel that never happened or wasn’t work-related into their totals.

Reveal Insights

When you start providing mileage reimbursements, they come with the benefit of learning the routines of your workers: how many patients they visit a day, how long a visit lasts on average, what routes they take, etc. Data like this will allow you to discover what works best in your organization, and identify and make changes as necessary such as routes that will be more beneficial to patients and aides. 

Make Everyone Happy

While you don’t need to reimburse for mileage driven for work, it’s a good practice that makes everyone happy. A reliable reimbursement program increases employee satisfaction, productivity and loyalty. If employees have to use their own vehicles for their jobs, knowing that they will be compensated makes them more likely to make that extra stop and go the extra mile.

An effective home care mileage reimbursement program brings your company many benefits, and when that program includes SureMileage by CompanyMileage, those benefits only grow. Our novel software solution calculates trip mileage for employees, so they can focus on their jobs and less on keeping track of odometer readings. At the end of the day, they simply submit their trips, and our system handles the rest. Our customers also use SureMileage as an opportunity to learn more about their mobile workers. 

If you’ve decided it’s finally time to enact a home health mileage reimbursement program, request a demo with CompanyMileage today to learn how to do it the right way.