Two payroll rules trip up more care operators than any other: what you must pay for a sleep-in shift, and whether inter-call travel time is paid working time. Both have settled legal answers. Getting either wrong creates back-dated NMW liability, HMRC investigation risk and potential Employment Tribunal claims. This page sets out the rules precisely, with a worked example and the April 2026 rate figures.
Do you pay minimum wage for a sleep-in shift?
After the Supreme Court's judgment in Royal Mencap Society v Tomlinson-Blake [2021] UKSC 8, the rule is: only time a worker is actually awake for the purposes of working counts for National Minimum Wage on a sleep-in shift. Sleeping time where the employer provides sleeping facilities is excluded from the NMW calculation. The worker is present on-site and on-call, but sleeping time does not attract the NMW. Only the moments they are woken and required to work, or cannot sleep because of the demands of the role, count.
This is also reflected in HMRC's NMW manual at NMWM08180: hours during which sleeping facilities are provided and the worker is not awake for the purposes of working are excluded from the salaried-hours calculation.
The sleep-in edge cases that flip the answer
The Mencap exclusion depends on two conditions being met. Either condition failing means the exclusion falls away and NMW applies to the whole shift.
- No sleeping facilities provided. If the worker must sleep in a chair, on a sofa or has no dedicated rest space, the facility condition is not met. The entire shift becomes NMW-paying time.
- Worker required to remain active throughout. Where the nature of the care means the worker must stay alert, is permitted only brief naps, or is in practice disturbed throughout the night, the shift is not a sleep-in in the Mencap sense. The full shift counts for NMW.
In practice, the risk zone is domiciliary settings where a live-in carer is working in an unfamiliar or unsuitable environment, or where the care plan demands high overnight responsiveness. Operators should document the sleeping arrangements for each sleep-in placement. If facilities are not adequate, the cost model must assume full NMW coverage for the whole shift.
One thing the rules do not provide is a fixed nightly sleep-in allowance. There is no statutory flat rate. The only test is the awake-for-work test; any flat payment must be reconciled against the NMW hourly floor applied to the hours actually worked during the night.
Is travel between care calls paid?
Yes, without exception. Travel between one client's home and the next client's home is working time for NMW purposes and must be paid at or above the applicable NMW rate. This is the single most common source of NMW underpayment in domiciliary care. Rota systems and invoicing models that pay only for face-to-face contact time, and nothing for the journey between calls, create an unlawful pay shortfall for every worker affected.
The exclusion is narrow: the journey from a worker's own home to the first call of the day, and from the last call back home, is commuting. Commuting is not working time. Everything in between, call to call, is.
The NMW averaging trap: a worked example
The averaging trap is where contact-only pay, which may look adequate per hour of care delivered, drops below the NMW floor once travel time is added to the worked-hours total.
From 1 April 2026, the National Living Wage is £12.71 per hour for workers aged 21 and over.
| Item | Example figure |
|---|---|
| Contact hours in a shift | 5 hours |
| Inter-call travel time in same shift | 1.5 hours |
| Total working time (NMW denominator) | 6.5 hours |
| Pay received (contact hours only at £13.00) | £65.00 |
| Effective hourly rate (£65.00 / 6.5 hrs) | £10.00 |
| NLW floor (April 2026) | £12.71 |
| Shortfall per hour of working time | £2.71 |
| Shortfall per shift | £17.62 |
A worker on this rota for a full year, over 230 shifts, accumulates an underpayment of over £4,000. Multiply across a team of 20 and the back-dated liability reaches six figures before interest and penalties. HMRC NMW underpayment notices also name the employer publicly.
Use our sleep-in shift NMW compliance calculator to test your own rota, and our true cost of a care hour calculator to model the full loaded cost including travel, NIC and holiday pay.
The April 2026 NMW rate table
All figures effective from 1 April 2026. Source: gov.uk National Minimum Wage Rates.
| Worker age / category | Hourly rate from 1 April 2026 |
|---|---|
| 21 and over (National Living Wage) | £12.71 |
| 18 to 20 | £10.85 |
| Under 18 and apprentice | £8.00 |
These are the floors before employer NIC at 15% above the secondary threshold and before holiday pay accrual. The total loaded cost per hour of care is materially higher.
What counts as working time for NMW: a quick reference
| Scenario | NMW working time? |
|---|---|
| Sleep-in: worker awake and actually working | Yes |
| Sleep-in: worker sleeping, facilities provided | No (Mencap 2021) |
| Sleep-in: no sleeping facilities provided | Yes (full shift) |
| Sleep-in: worker required to remain active throughout | Yes (full shift) |
| Travel between care calls | Yes |
| Travel from home to first call (commuting) | No |
| Travel from last call home (commuting) | No |
Two hidden add-ons that compound the exposure
Mileage reimbursement at the new AMAP rate
Domiciliary care workers using their own vehicles for inter-call travel are entitled to mileage reimbursement. From 6 April 2026, the AMAP rate rises to 55p per mile for the first 10,000 business miles (up from 45p). Paying below AMAP is not a legal breach in itself, but it allows the worker to claim a deduction for the shortfall and it signals to HMRC that inter-call travel is being managed below the recommended floor. For high-mileage carers, the difference between 45p and 55p over a year is a material employer cost that must be built into your fee models.
Holiday pay for irregular-hours staff
Bank, zero-hours and casual carers accrue holiday entitlement at 12.07% of hours worked each pay period. The critical compliance point is the reference period: holiday pay must reflect average earnings across a representative period, and that average must include travel-time payments and any regular overtime. Operators who pay contact-time only, without travel, are also under-paying holiday. The reference-period error is a separate, compounding liability on top of the NMW shortfall. Employment Tribunal claims for domiciliary care consistently cite both in the same claim.
The self-employed carer myth
Many domiciliary providers engage carers on self-employed contracts to sidestep PAYE, NIC and NMW obligations. HMRC's audit activity in adult social care is focused precisely on this structure. The label on the contract is not the test. The substance of the arrangement is.
Workers who cannot send a substitute of their choosing, are directed on when and where to work, use the provider's clients and are subject to the provider's rota are almost always employees or workers under HMRC's employment-status tests. Back-dated PAYE, NIC and NMW liability can reach years into the past. For a domiciliary agency with 30 carers on self-employed terms, the potential back-dated exposure is material enough to make a status review one of the highest-value compliance actions the business can take.
Making your rota NMW-safe
The practical steps are straightforward once the rules are clear. Review your rota system and confirm that every inter-call journey is recorded and paid. Audit sleep-in placements for sleeping-facilities adequacy. Reconcile your effective hourly rate, total pay divided by total working hours including travel, against the £12.71 NLW floor for every worker aged 21 and over. Revisit any self-employed carer arrangements against the employment-status tests before an HMRC inspection does it for you.
For domiciliary providers this is also a fee-modelling exercise: if your current fee structure was built on contact-time-only costs, it does not reflect the true cost of compliant employment. The true cost of a care hour calculator walks through the loaded cost including travel, NIC at 15% above the £5,000 secondary threshold, and holiday accrual, so you can test whether your current fee covers it.
Our care payroll service is built around the domiciliary compliance picture: rota-to-payslip reconciliation, NMW averaging checks on every pay run, holiday-pay reference-period calculations that include travel, and PAYE status reviews for self-employed arrangements. See the domiciliary care hub for the full picture of what compliant payroll looks like at scale, and the true cost of sponsoring overseas care workers for the next major payroll compliance question domiciliary agencies face.