When Is an Employer Required to Pay for Travel Time?

Not every job requires the employee to travel outside their normal commute.

But under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act and related guidelines published by the U.S. Department of Labor, nonexempt employees are entitled to pay for travel time in certain cases when travel is performed in the service of their jobs.

When Can an Employee Get Pay for Travel Time?

It’s probably no surprise that an ordinary commute from home to work and back home again required for common 9-to-5 jobs does not constitute compensable work time.

Once the employer starts altering that paradigm, however, exceptions may kick in that make the employee’s travel time compensable.

Employees who are expected to do substantial amounts of work at home in addition to traveling to and from a worksite may be entitled to compensation for that travel time.

Minor or isolated tasks like checking voicemail might not count. But where the at-home job duties become a substantial part of the employee’s work, their employer may owe them pay for travel time between their home and the job site.

Travel time is also compensable when the employee has to work at multiple job sites.

In that case, their travel time from one job site to another is considered compensable work time.

Pay for Travel Time Out of Town

Likewise, if the employee gets a special one-day assignment in a different city from the one in which they usually work, their travel time to and from that city is considered work time and therefore qualifies for compensation.

Time the employee spends traveling between their home and a transportation hub such as an airport or train station is not compensable time, however.

What about overnight travel? Pay for travel time during overnight trips varies depending on how the travel time fits with the employee’s regular work schedule.

Employees can expect to receive pay for travel time that happens during the time of day that corresponds to their regular working hours.

This rule makes travel time compensable even if the travel happens on a day that the employee doesn’t normally work – as long as the travel happens during the time of day that the employee normally works.

For example, say an employee who normally works 9 to 5, Monday through Friday leaves work at 3PM on Thursday to fly to another city on an overnight business trip, where he’ll arrive at 7PM. That employee’s time from 3PM to 5PM is considered compensable, but the remainder of his travel time that day is not since it’s outside his normal working hours.

Suppose the same employee’s return flight leaves at 10AM Saturday and gets him back home by 2PM the same day. All that time is compensable work time, since it occurred during the same time of day the employee usually spends working on a work day.

What’s more, compensable travel time may count towards the employee’s hours for purposes of calculating overtime pay.

That means the employee may be entitled to a few hours’ worth of pay at the higher overtime rate if their compensable travel time pushes their total work hours over 40 in a given week.

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