Driver Allowance

What driver allowance is

Driver allowance is money for the driver's own food and stay on a duty. It is not a service charge and it is not our margin: it is what covers the driver looking after himself while your vehicle is out with you. It is set for the vehicle class you book, and it does not change from one trip to the next or from one driver to another.

It is shown as its own line rather than folded into one bundled fare because a single all-in number hides what it is actually made of. Split out, you can see exactly what portion of the figure pays for the trip itself, the vehicle, the fuel, the driver's time behind the wheel, and what portion pays for the person driving it to look after his own food and stay while he is away from home on your behalf. Neither portion can be quietly inflated by hiding inside the other, because each one is a figure you can check against the published rate before you ever confirm the booking.

The figure travels with the vehicle class, not with whichever driver happens to be assigned to your trip. Two different drivers taking out the same class of car on two different bookings are paid to the same allowance, because it is set by what the duty asks of him rather than by who he is or what he might think to ask for. That is also why the amount cannot be talked up or down at the roadside: it was fixed before your trip was ever booked, and it is printed on your quotation rather than decided on the day.

Driver allowance by vehicle class

The published rate runs from ₹300 to ₹800 a day, and every class on our rate card carries its own figure rather than one number for all of them. The rate for the vehicle you actually book is what appears on your quotation.

Read the table against the vehicle class named on your quotation, not against the length or difficulty of the trip you have planned. A hatchback and a tempo traveller carry different figures because the vehicle itself is different, a larger vehicle is generally a longer and more demanding day for whoever is driving it, not because one trip is worth more to us than another. Once you know which class you have booked, that row is the figure that applies for every day of that trip: it does not move if the trip turns out longer or shorter than planned within the same class, and it does not move because the destination is further away or the route is harder.

When it applies

Driver allowance is charged per calendar day the vehicle is held by you, including the day it comes back, in exactly the way the days themselves are counted at /legal/km-and-hours-computation. A same-day airport run or a local duty carries one day of it, because the car leaves and returns to you within the same calendar day. A three-day outstation trip, say a car that leaves on a Friday morning and returns on a Sunday evening, carries three days of it: one for Friday, one for Saturday, one for Sunday, and the number is stated on your quotation before you confirm rather than added up afterwards.

The charge follows the calendar day the vehicle is held, not the kilometres it covers on that day. A day spent mostly stationary, waiting outside a wedding venue or a client meeting while you are inside, still carries the same allowance as a day spent driving for eight hours, because the driver is away from his own home and looking after his own food and stay either way. What varies the total is how many days the car is held, never how far it travels on any one of them.

The hour does not matter

It is worth stating this in plain words rather than leaving it to be assumed, because it is not how the trade generally works. A good many operators publish one fare for daytime pick-ups and a higher one, sometimes with a higher driver allowance alongside it, for anything before six in the morning or after ten at night. We do not run that way.

The published rate is the rate at every hour of the day. Whether your pick-up is at nine in the morning or three in the morning, the per kilometre fare and the driver allowance on your quotation are the same figure. Nothing on this tariff depends on the clock, and there is no night charge of any kind.

An early flight, a late train, a wedding procession that runs past midnight: none of it changes the number on your quotation. A pick-up at four in the morning is quoted at the same rate as the same trip at noon, driver allowance included, because the tariff has no clock in it at all. If you are holding our quotation against somebody else's for the same trip, this is worth checking on both: a night premium is often where the difference between two figures is quietly sitting.

The driver's night halt

On a multi-day outstation trip, a separate charge can apply where the hotel you have booked will not accommodate the driver at all. This is the driver's night halt, and it covers putting him up elsewhere for that night. It is a different charge from driver allowance and it does not apply on every multi-day trip. Where it does apply, we tell you before the trip rather than after it, and the full detail on when it is charged is at /booking-terms.

Here is what that looks like in practice. A family books a car for three nights to a hill station, and the property they have chosen, a smaller guesthouse built for guests rather than staff, has no room set aside for a driver. On a night that property genuinely cannot accommodate him, he is put up elsewhere nearby at our arrangement, and that cost is the night halt, charged as its own line for that night alone. If the same trip's other two nights are spent at hotels that do have a driver's room, no night halt applies to those nights at all: driver allowance alone covers them.

The two charges answer different questions, and a trip can carry one without the other, or both together on the same night. Driver allowance answers what his food and stay cost across the days you hold the vehicle, and it is charged every day regardless of where he sleeps. Night halt answers a narrower question, whether we had to arrange and pay for a separate bed for him on a particular night because the hotel could not provide one, and it is charged only on the nights that is actually true. A night halt can also follow from how a day's driving is planned rather than only from a hotel's own room count: where a route needs a second driver or a rest break under our duty hours and rest policy at /legal/driver-conduct-and-duty-hours, any halt that follows from it is priced and told to you the same way, before the trip rather than after it.

Driver accommodation and meals

Where your hotel has a driver's room, as most do on the routes we run, we ask that the driver be given a bed there for the night rather than left to sleep in the vehicle. His meals are his own, funded by the driver allowance shown on your quotation. Where the hotel genuinely has no space for him, that is the night halt described above, and it is its own line rather than something folded quietly into a larger driver allowance figure.

What we ask of you in return is small. Where you have booked your own hotel rather than through us, a call to the property ahead of arrival confirming that a driver's room is available saves an argument at the reception desk after a long day on the road, and it is genuinely the one thing in your hands. We do not expect you to feed him at your own table, seat him with your party or otherwise treat him as a guest of the trip: the allowance already on your quotation is what he uses to arrange his own food, the same way he would on any other duty.

What we do not ask of you is to negotiate his stay yourself, pay a hotel on his behalf, or work out where he sleeps. That is settled between us and the property, or handled as a night halt if it needs to be, before it is ever put in front of you.

Shown as a named line on your quotation

This is the same commitment this site makes about every figure on a quotation, restated here because it applies to driver allowance as directly as it applies to anything else. A price built from named lines, each stated and totalled before you confirm, cannot quietly turn out to have something missing from it once you are at the destination with nowhere else to go. Driver allowance is one of those named lines from the outset, not a figure added to a headline fare after you have already committed to the trip.

The driver allowance is money for the driver's food and accommodation. It is shown as a named line on your quotation before you confirm, at the published rate. It is never added at the end of the trip and it is never negotiated with you by the driver at the destination.

It also settles a question worth stating outright rather than leaving to be inferred: driver allowance is billed to you on our invoice, as part of what you pay us for the trip, and it is not a sum you are expected to hand to the driver yourself at any point. He draws it through us, the same way he is paid for the duty itself, which is exactly why there is nothing left over for him to ask you for and nothing left for you to work out with him once you have reached where you are going.

If a driver asks you for more

Every genuine charge on your trip, driver allowance included, is a named line on your quotation with a figure against it, agreed before you travel. No driver on our panel is instructed to ask for anything beyond that, and none has the authority to.

If a driver asks you for any payment not shown on your quotation, please do not pay it. Call +91 99966 69190 and we will resolve it immediately.

GST treatment

Driver allowance is part of the taxable value of the fare. It is not billed apart from GST: it is added into the consideration for the trip and taxed along with the fare itself, at the same rate. How GST is worked out and shown on your invoice is set out in full at /legal/gst-and-invoicing.

There is no separate rate for driver allowance and no lower classification that applies to it on its own: it is taxed as part of the single consideration for your chauffeur-driven hire, under whichever SAC code and at whichever treatment applies to the trip as a whole, including reverse charge where you are booking as a body-corporate client, all of which is set out in full at /legal/gst-and-invoicing.