Hourly employees do get paid for travel time, but only for certain kinds of travel. Your ordinary commute between home and your regular workplace is unpaid. Travel between job sites once your workday has started is paid. Trips that take you out of town for the day, or overnight, follow their own rules, and those rules turn on when the travel happens and what you’re doing during it.
Your Daily Commute Doesn’t Count
The drive from home to your regular workplace and back is not compensable, no matter how long it takes or how bad the traffic is. Federal regulations treat commuting as “a normal incident of employment,” and the rule holds whether you report to one fixed location or rotate through different sites.1eCFR. 29 CFR 785.35 – Home to Work; Ordinary Situation The Portal-to-Portal Act put this in the statute directly, excluding “walking, riding, or traveling to and from the actual place of performance” of the job from paid hours.2Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 29 US Code 254 – Relief from Liability and Punishment
Driving a Company Vehicle Home
Taking an employer-provided vehicle home doesn’t turn the commute into paid time on its own. Under the Employee Commuting Flexibility Act, the drive stays unpaid when the travel is within the normal commuting area for the business, the arrangement is covered by an agreement between you and your employer, and the vehicle isn’t substantially harder to drive than an ordinary car.3U.S. Department of Labor. Travel Time Vehicles like 18-wheelers, truck-mounted cranes, and concrete trucks cross that last line because operating them imposes real burdens beyond a normal commute.4U.S. Department of Labor. FLSA2001-11
Stopping to Load Equipment
If your employer requires you to stop at a warehouse or shop to load tools or materials before heading to a job site, the workday has begun. Loading is considered integral and indispensable to your main job, so the drive from the shop to the site is paid travel. Simply choosing to meet coworkers at the shop and ride along, without doing any work yourself, doesn’t trigger this rule.
Travel Between Job Sites Is Paid
Once your workday begins, all travel between work locations is compensable. Driving from one client to another, going from the office to a job site, moving between company branches: it’s all paid time.5U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet 22 – Hours Worked Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) – Section: Travel Time The DOL treats this as part of your principal activity because the employer is directing where you go and when.
A plumber dispatched from one call to another is working during that drive, even in light traffic. The test isn’t whether the travel feels like work. It’s whether it happens between the start and end of your work duties for the day.
Meal Breaks on the Road
An employer can deduct a real meal break from paid travel time. The break has to last at least 30 minutes, and you must be completely relieved of duties.6eCFR. 29 CFR 785.19 – Meal Eating a sandwich while driving between sites isn’t a meal break. Stopping at a restaurant with no work obligations for half an hour is.
One-Day Trips to Another City
When your employer sends you on a one-day assignment outside your normal commuting area, the travel time is paid. The DOL treats this as travel done at the employer’s direction, not as an ordinary commute.7eCFR. 29 CFR 785.37 – Home to Work on Special One-Day Assignment in Another City
The employer can subtract the time you’d normally spend commuting to your regular workplace. So if your usual commute is 20 minutes each way but the special assignment takes two hours each way, the employer subtracts 40 minutes total from the four hours of travel, leaving three hours and 20 minutes of paid time.5U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet 22 – Hours Worked Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) – Section: Travel Time A bona fide meal break during the trip is also deductible.
Overnight Travel
Overnight business trips follow their own rule, and it’s the one most employees get wrong. Travel that keeps you away from home overnight is paid when it falls during your normal working hours, regardless of the day of the week.8eCFR. 29 CFR 785.39 – Travel Away from Home Community
Say you normally work Monday through Friday, 9 to 5. A flight on Saturday afternoon between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. is paid, because those hours overlap your regular schedule. A flight on Sunday from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. is not, because those hours fall outside your normal work window.
The unpaid carve-out applies only when you’re a passenger. If you’re driving, the time is compensable regardless of when it happens. Any work you actually perform in transit, like answering emails on a laptop, is also paid. The DOL’s position is that only passive ride time outside your regular hours escapes the pay requirement.5U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet 22 – Hours Worked Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) – Section: Travel Time
Airport Waits and Layovers
Time at an airport or bus station follows the same logic as the travel itself. Sitting at the gate during your normal work hours is compensable. Waiting outside those hours is not. On cross-country trips, the time zone at your point of departure governs when your normal hours fall.
Travel to Required Training
Travel to attend employer-required training, conferences, or meetings is generally paid. Attendance at training itself counts as work time unless all four of these are true: it falls outside normal hours, it’s truly voluntary, it isn’t directly related to the job, and no other work is performed.9U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet 22 – Hours Worked Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) – Section: Lectures, Meetings and Training Programs If your employer tells you to be there, it isn’t voluntary. The travel itself follows the one-day or overnight rules above.
The Rate for Travel Time Can Be Lower
Employers can legally pay a different, lower hourly rate for travel time than for your regular duties. Nothing in federal law requires travel hours to be paid at your normal rate. The only floor is the applicable minimum wage. Many construction and service companies pay one rate for windshield time and a higher one for on-site work.
Using two rates changes how overtime is figured. When you work at more than one rate in the same workweek, your overtime rate is based on a weighted average, not the higher rate alone.10eCFR. 29 CFR 778.115 – Employees Working at Two or More Rates The employer adds up total earnings from all rates, divides by total hours worked, and uses that blended figure as the base for the overtime premium.
Travel Time Counts Toward Overtime
Every hour of compensable travel counts toward the 40-hour weekly threshold for overtime. That’s why unpaid travel disputes matter beyond the travel itself: an employer who shaves two hours a day off the books may also be dodging overtime that would otherwise have kicked in.
The overtime rate is one and a half times your regular rate, which is total weekly compensation divided by total hours worked.11U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet 56A – Overview of the Regular Rate of Pay Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) Thirty-five hours at your normal rate plus 10 hours of paid travel at a lower rate is 45 hours total, meaning five hours of overtime figured on the weighted average of both rates.
Mileage Reimbursement Is a Separate Question
Mileage reimbursement isn’t travel time pay. Travel time pay compensates you for hours spent traveling. Mileage reimbursement covers the cost of using your personal vehicle: gas, wear and tear, insurance, depreciation. Federal law doesn’t require employers to reimburse mileage at all, though some states do. What federal law does require is that unreimbursed vehicle expenses can’t drive your effective hourly pay below the minimum wage.
Tracking Your Hours
Employers are required to keep accurate records of hours worked each day and each week for every non-exempt employee, and that includes compensable travel.12eCFR. 29 CFR Part 516 – Records to Be Kept by Employers Payroll records must be preserved for at least three years and daily time records for at least two.
In practice, you’ll want your own log. Note departure times, arrival times, and the purpose of each trip. Contemporaneous records carry far more weight than a retroactive estimate if a dispute ever comes up. A quick entry on your phone after each trip is enough.
If You Aren’t Being Paid
The FLSA has real teeth when travel time goes unpaid. You can recover the full amount of unpaid wages plus an equal amount in liquidated damages, effectively doubling what you’re owed.13Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 29 US Code 216 – Penalties The court must also award reasonable attorney’s fees, so legal costs don’t come out of your recovery. An employer can escape liquidated damages only by proving it acted in good faith and genuinely believed it was following the law.14Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 29 US Code 260 – Liquidated Damages
You have two years from each unpaid paycheck to file a claim, or three years if the violation was willful.15Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 29 US Code 255 – Statute of Limitations You can file a complaint with the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division at 1-866-487-9243.16U.S. Department of Labor. How to File a Complaint A private lawsuit in federal or state court is also an option, and many states add their own penalties on top of the federal remedies.