Credit hire and tolls when your car is off the road

What happens to your toll account when your car is off the road

Your toll account is tied to a tag and to the registration of the car it normally sits in. The moment your car goes into the panel shop, two things change: the car is not being driven, and the tag is either sitting in a drawer or still stuck to the windscreen of a car that is up on a hoist.

If you do nothing, your account keeps ticking over. Most accounts charge a small ongoing fee or require a minimum spend, and a dormant tag can trigger a letter asking whether the account is still needed. That is annoying but harmless. The real problem is the opposite: you start driving a replacement car with a different plate, the tag stays behind, and every gantry between the Lane Cove Tunnel and the M7 photographs a plate that is not linked to any account you own.

Within a few days you will start receiving toll notices. In NSW these arrive addressed to the registered operator of the vehicle, which during a credit hire period is not you. If the hire company has not nominated you as the driver, the notice goes to them first, and they will pass it on. That adds a layer of delay and, if it is handled badly, a layer of fees.

The clean approach is to decide before you collect the replacement car whether you are putting the tolls on your own account or letting the hire company handle them and reimbursing them. Either works. Doing neither is how people end up with three notices, two reminder letters and a bad mood.

Whether a replacement car can use your existing tag

A tag is not magic. It is a short-range radio device that identifies an account. If you physically move your tag into the replacement car, it will usually be read at the gantry and the toll will be charged to your account. Whether that is allowed depends on your account terms, not on the tag.

Most NSW toll accounts let you nominate additional vehicles, and some let you use a tag in a temporary vehicle for a limited period. The practical steps are:

• Log in to your toll account and add the replacement car's registration as a temporary vehicle, with the start and end dates of the hire.
• If your provider allows tag transfer, move the tag across and keep the holder stuck in the same spot on the windscreen, low and central, away from metallic sun strips.
• If your provider does not allow it, leave the tag in your own car and let the replacement car be charged by plate, then link that plate to your account so the trips bill to you rather than generating notices.
• Remove the replacement car from your account the day you hand it back, or you will keep paying for a plate that is now on someone else's fleet.

Two traps. First, a tag left in a car that is being repaired can be read if the car is moved around the yard or taken for a test drive, which puts stray trips on your account. Take it out. Second, if the replacement car is delivered to you, the handover is the moment to sort this out, not the next morning when you are already on the M8 heading to the airport.

If you are weighing up whether credit hire is the right route at all, the mechanics are set out in how credit hire works, and the practical booking side sits with accident replacement cars in Sydney.

Tolls on the M2, M7, M8, Harbour Bridge and Tunnel

Sydney's toll network is not one system with one rulebook, and that catches people out. The Harbour Bridge and Tunnel are distance-based and time-of-day based, which means a 7am crossing from North Sydney into the city costs more than the same crossing at 10am. The M2, M7 and M8 are all electronic, all camera-enforced, and all unforgiving about a plate that is not linked to an account.

What that means in practice during a hire:

If your normal week involves the M2 from Baulkham Hills to Macquarie Park, or the M8 from Leichhardt to the airport, those trips do not stop because your car is off the road. You will do them in the replacement car. The tolls are real, they are incurred, and they belong to somebody.

The good news is that tolls are usually a small line item compared with the rest of a credit hire claim. The bad news is that they are the easiest thing for an insurer to poke at, because they are individually itemised and easy to question. Keep them tidy and they disappear into the claim. Leave them messy and they become a paragraph in a dispute letter.

Who pays tolls incurred during a credit hire period

Start with the honest answer: the tolls are incurred by whoever is driving, and the question is who ultimately bears them. In a credit hire arrangement, the hire company provides the car on credit and then recovers the cost, including reasonable running costs, from the at fault insurer. Tolls are a running cost, and they are generally recoverable in the same way as the hire itself.

But recoverable is not the same as automatic. The usual structure works like this:

1. You drive the replacement car and incur tolls on your normal routes.
2. Those tolls are either charged to your own account or invoiced to you by the hire company.
3. You keep evidence: a toll account statement, or a trip record with dates and gantry points.
4. The hire company includes the toll amount in the claim put to the at fault insurer.
5. The insurer pays, or disputes, on the same basis it disputes the hire itself.

What you should not do is assume the hire company is silently absorbing every gantry. Some arrangements include tolls in the daily rate, some pass them through, and some ask you to keep your own account and claim them back. Ask at handover which model applies, and get it in writing if you can.

There is also a practical point about the at fault driver. If they have admitted fault and their insurer is paying, the tolls sit in the same bucket as the hire. If fault is disputed, everything is provisional until it is resolved, which is covered in when an insurer disputes a credit hire claim. Either way, the paper trail you keep in the first week decides how easy the last week is.

Keeping a record of trips for the claim file

You do not need a spreadsheet with twenty columns. You need something a solicitor or an insurer's assessor can read in thirty seconds and accept. The standard that works is:

• Date of each trip.
• Entry and exit points, for example M2 Pennant Hills Road to Lane Cove Road.
• Purpose, in three or four words: commute, client meeting, school run, airport.
• Amount, taken from your toll statement rather than guessed.

If the tolls are on your own account, your monthly statement is the record. Download the PDF, highlight the replacement car's plate, and keep it with the hire paperwork. If the tolls are invoiced by the hire company, you will get a summary at the end of the hire, and you should check it against your own memory of where you drove.

Two things to avoid. First, do not reconstruct tolls from memory three months later. Gantries do not issue receipts at the time, and an insurer will not accept a hand-written list with round numbers. Second, do not include trips that have nothing to do with the claim. A weekend run to the Hunter in the replacement car is a real trip, but it is not a trip the at fault insurer will accept as a cost of the accident, and including it weakens the rest of the file.

The same discipline applies to the hire itself. If you are keeping toll records, you are already keeping the kind of records that make a credit hire claim straightforward, which is the same approach set out in credit hire costs and who pays what.

What to do if a toll notice arrives for the hire car

It will happen. You will get a notice addressed to the registered operator, which is the hire company, forwarded to you, with a date and a gantry and a plate that matches the car in your driveway. Do not ignore it and do not pay it twice.

The sequence that works:

1. Read the notice and check the date against your own diary. If you had the car that day, it is yours to sort out.
2. Contact the hire company the same week. They can nominate you as the driver so future notices come straight to you, which stops the forwarding loop.
3. Pay the toll through your own account if you can, or reimburse the hire company if they have already paid it.
4. Keep the notice and the payment confirmation in the claim folder.
5. If a late fee has been added because the notice sat unopened, deal with it quickly and be honest about whose delay caused it.

The trap is the second notice. Once a toll goes unpaid, the operator issues a reminder, and reminder fees are the kind of thing an insurer will refuse to pay because they were avoidable. A toll that was paid on time is a clean line item. A toll that went to reminder status is an argument.

If the notice is for a date before you collected the car, or after you returned it, say so immediately. That is the hire company's problem, not yours, and it is much easier to fix in the first week than the fifth.

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Tolls and the at fault insurer's idea of reasonable costs

Insurers do not object to tolls in principle. They object to tolls that look like lifestyle rather than necessity. The distinction they draw is between the trips you would have made in your own car and trips that only exist because you had a replacement car.

What tends to be accepted without much argument:

• Your regular commute, if you have one and it uses a toll road.
• Client meetings and site visits that you would have driven to anyway.
• Airport runs that were already booked.
• Trips to the repairer or the assessor.

What tends to attract questions:

• Repeated weekend trips to the Southern Highlands or the Central Coast.
• Long M7 runs with no obvious purpose.
• Peak-hour Harbour Tunnel crossings every single day when your own car was a weekend-only proposition.

The test is not whether the trip was enjoyable. It is whether it is a cost caused by the accident. If your own car would have done the trip, the toll is part of the loss. If the trip only happened because a nice replacement car was sitting outside, it is not.

This is the same logic that applies to the rate of the replacement car itself. If you normally drive a prestige SUV, a like-for-like replacement is defensible, and that principle is set out in like for like. If you normally drive a hatchback and you take a large SUV for six weeks, the tolls are the least of the questions you will get.

Where a large replacement is genuinely needed, a seven-seat diesel like the Audi Q7 Quattro is a common answer for families whose own car is off the road.

Returning the car and closing the toll account

The last twenty minutes of a credit hire period are where loose ends get tied or left dangling. Tolls are one of the easiest to get wrong, because the account changes you made at the start need to be undone at the end.

Do these before the car leaves your driveway:

1. Take your own tag out of the replacement car if you moved it across.
2. Remove the replacement car's registration from your toll account, or it will keep billing you for a plate that is now back on the fleet.
3. Download a final toll statement covering the hire dates and save it with the hire paperwork.
4. Check whether the hire company has any outstanding toll charges to pass through, and settle them.
5. Note the return date and time, because any toll after that point is not yours.

If the car is being collected rather than returned, do the same checks at handover. A tag left in a car that is driven back to a depot in Mascot or Parramatta can pick up a stray gantry reading on the way, and you will not know until the statement arrives.

Once the tolls are closed out, the remaining threads are the hire invoice and the repair. The timeline from there is set out in the credit hire timeline from crash to settlement, and the wider picture of how the at fault side pays is in credit hire versus paying yourself. If you are booking the next replacement, the fleet and availability are at drivetribe.com.au.

Bookings through this site are fulfilled by Drive Tribe (drivetribe.com.au), the trading name of Australian Business Holdings Pty Ltd, and this site is part of that group.

Tolls for utes, fleets and long-distance work

Trade and fleet drivers have a different toll profile to commuters. A ute that runs between a yard in Merrylands and sites at Eastern Creek, Prestons and Badgerys Creek will hit the M4, M7 and M8 most days, and the tolls are a genuine operating cost rather than an occasional crossing.

If that is you, three things matter more than usual:

• Match the replacement to the work. A ute that tows or carries tools needs a replacement that can do the same job, not a sedan that happens to be available.
• Keep a trip log by site, not just by date. Fleet claims get audited more closely because the numbers are larger.
• Tell the hire company at booking that the vehicle is a work vehicle, so the toll and usage expectations are set from day one.

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Fleet arrangements are covered in more detail in credit hire for business and fleet cars, and if you are a repairer or broker referring clients, the referral side sits at partners and referrals.

One last point on honesty: no one can promise an insurer will pay every toll without question. What you can control is whether the record is clean, whether the trips are defensible, and whether the account changes were made at the right time. That is most of the battle.