8. Understanding ‘Private Travel’
‘Private travel’ is the travel – “… between the employee’s place of residence and his place of employment …”.
If you can identify the employee’s place of residence and place of employment, then it is easy – any travel between these two places is private travel. If not, it is business travel.
Please be note that the guidance that follows is Rob Cooper’s personal opinion and not that of SARS. It is not infallible, but it can help to analyse the problem, and hopefully come close to the correct answer.

Place of Residence
To help you to identify the place of residence correctly, it has been split into the many types of residence into two groups:
1. a ‘usual’ place of residence:
a. the employee’s regular home, or
b. the place where the employee returns to “after all his wanderings”.
2. a ‘temporary’ place of residence:
a. hotel room
b. guest house
c. rented accommodation
d. a friend’s home
e. …that is used for business reasons for a ‘short’ period of time, and while the employee has a separate ‘usual’ place of residence.
The business reasons for using a ‘temporary’ place of residence include:
• a sales representative seeing customers in an area away from home
• a builder working on a building contract in an area away from home
• a visit from head office to a branch office or vice versa.
Any travel to or from a short-term temporary place of residence is potentially business travel.
Note that a ‘temporary’ place of residence must become the ‘usual’ place of residence:
1. In the absence of a ‘usual’ place of residence eg. if an employee sells his home and lives in a hotel for a few months while building or purchasing a new home
2. If the ‘temporary’ place of residence is occupied for longer than a ‘short’ period of time.
There is no guidance to help define whether a period of time is ‘short’ or ‘long’.

Place of Employment
The ‘place of employment’ is the second criteria that must be established when determining ‘private travel’. Again, to assist you to apply the concept correctly to a variety of scenarios, this has been split into the many types of places of employment into two groups –
1. a ‘usual’’ place of employment:
a. where the employee normally attends work, has a desk, reports for meetings, etc.
b. the place where he is normally directly controlled and supervised from.
2. a ‘temporary’ place of employment:
a. If the ‘usual’ place of employment is the head office, a branch office (or vice versa)
b. If the ‘usual’ place of employment is an office of the building company, a building site
c. In general, any place of work that is not the usual place of employment.
Any travel to or from a temporary place of employment is potentially business travel.
Note that a ‘temporary’ place of employment must become the ‘usual’ place of employment if the employee is transferred (eg. to a branch office) and reports for work at premises that were previously the ‘temporary’ place of employment.
To further justify the interpretation that travel to or from a temporary place of employment is business travel, the use of the word employment in both ‘definitions’ of private travel instead of the word ‘work’ is significant. One can assume that in the minds of the legislators, the place of employment and the place of work are two different concepts.
As a generalisation, the ‘place of employment’ is a narrower concept than the ‘place of work’.
However, the SARS website and the SARS Logbook now state that: “It is important to note that travel between your home and place of work cannot be claimed and is regarded as private travel.”
For example, for employees of a building company, the place of employment would be the head office or branch office of the building company, but the place of work could be at various building sites for periods of time during their employment.
In this scenario, the place of work is not the same as the place of employment – it is the temporary place of employment.
Note that for the purposes of this discussion, the concepts of ‘temporary’ and ‘usual’ is very much a function of the length of time.
Where an employee of a building contractor is required to work from the building site on which office space is provided for the duration of contract (say for 6 months or more), then one must treat the building site as the usual place of employment (place of work).

Special Scenarios
Private travel, but outside of normal working hours:
The employee must travel from his ‘usual’ place of residence to his ‘usual’ place of employment but after normal working hours to attend to an emergency.
Unofficial advice in the past was to link this emergency travel to the ‘Standby’ vehicle nil value concession in the Seventh Schedule for company cars that classifies the use of a maintenance vehicle as business travel if the conditions for the zero-rating of the fringe benefit are met.
Applying the ‘standby’ vehicle principle to this scenario:
• If the ‘after hours’ travel to the workplace is regular and not as result of an emergency, this would certainly be an indication of ‘private’ travel, therefore taxable.
• If it happens on an irregular basis, or infrequently, it might be business travel.
There is no firm opinion or guidance on this one, so it would be best to follow the ‘no risk’ route, and tax the ‘after hours’ travel as private travel if it is paid for by the employer.
‘Home office’:
In this scenario, the place of employment and the place of residence are the same physical place (eg. a director who runs his company from his home, or somebody on WFH (Work From Home) in these post-Covid days).
There can be no private travel in respect of travel from his ‘usual’ place of residence to his ‘usual’ place of employment because they are the same place. Obviously, travel for shopping, visits to friends, doctor’s visits, etc. is private travel.