Travel Time Pay for Hourly Employees: Which Trips Count

§1The default: the commute is not hours worked

An employee who leaves home before the regular workday and comes back at the end of it is commuting. The regulation calls this “ordinary home to work travel which is a normal incident of employment,” and it holds “whether he works at a fixed location or at different job sites.” [29 CFR 785.35] That second clause is the one employers miss. A field technician whose sites change every day still has an unpaid commute to the first site of the day and home from the last one.

Section 4 of the Portal-to-Portal Act is what makes the rule hold. It removes employer liability for time spent “walking, riding, or traveling to and from the actual place of performance of the principal activity,” unless the activity is compensable by express contract or by custom or practice. [29 CFR 785.34] Read closely, the provision caps an employer's exposure. It does not set a floor.

One question comes up in almost every audit of a timekeeping system. Does paying for the commute turn it into hours worked? It does not. The same section says ordinary travel from home to work “need not be counted as hours worked even if the employer agrees to pay for it.” [29 CFR 785.34] A commuting allowance is a benefit, and the agreement behind it does not move the time into the weekly hours total.

The statute also handles the company car. Commuting in an employer's vehicle, along with activity incidental to the ride, sits outside the principal activities when the use falls within the normal commuting area and an agreement between the employer and the employee or the employee's representative covers it. [29 CFR 785.34] Both conditions have to hold, which is why an informal arrangement with no written agreement is a weak position to rely on.

The federal floor is thin, and a state may set a higher one. Check the state's own travel and reporting-time rules before writing a policy you then have to unwind. Our final paycheck deadlines by state page covers the pay-timing rules that run alongside this one.

§2The trips, sorted by what the regulation says

The federal rule works through a set of scenarios, each with its own condition. The table lays the same material out by trip type and names the section that decides each row.

The rest of this page works through the rows that carry arithmetic, since those are where the payroll system gets it wrong.

§3Between job sites during the workday

Time spent travelling as part of the principal activity counts as hours worked. The regulation's own example is travel from job site to job site during the workday. [29 CFR 785.38]

The distinction that decides most cases is whether the travel is the work or the way to the work. Driving from one client's office to the next is part of the day. Driving from home to the first client's office is the commute, and §785.35 applies to it even though the destination changes from day to day.

A route that crosses a lunch break needs its own line. The unpaid meal sits inside the day, and the travel on either side of it does not.

§4The meeting place and the tool pickup

The regulation also covers a trip that looks like a commute and is not. Where an employee has to report at a meeting place to receive instructions or to pick up and carry tools, “the travel from the designated place to the work place is part of the day's work, and must be counted as hours worked regardless of contract, custom, or practice.” [29 CFR 785.38]

That closing phrase is the part to keep. A handbook cannot waive this leg, and neither can a long-standing company practice. If the crew meets at the yard at 6:30 and drives to the site, the yard-to-site leg is paid.

The driveway-to-yard leg is a different question, and the regulation does not treat it as work. The worked example in §785.37 deducts exactly that leg, describing travel between home and the depot as sitting in the home-to-work category. [29 CFR 785.37]

§5A one-day assignment in another city

§785.37 works through an employee based in Washington who is sent to New York for a single day: told to leave at 8 a.m., ready for work at noon, finished at 3 p.m., and back in Washington by 7 p.m. The regulation says this travel “cannot be regarded as ordinary home-to-work travel occasioned merely by the fact of employment,” because it was performed for the employer's benefit and at its special request. [29 CFR 785.37]

The deduction is the part that stands in for the normal commute. Since the employee would have had to report to the regular work site anyway, the regulation allows the leg between home and the depot to be deducted as home-to-work travel, along with the usual meal time. [29 CFR 785.37] A twenty-minute drive to the office sets the size of the deduction. The two hours to the airport do not enter it.

Set the number before the trip leaves. A policy that fixes the deductible portion at the employee's ordinary commute, measured once and recorded, survives a wage audit. A manager reconstructing the figure months later does not.

§6Trips that keep an employee away overnight

Travel that keeps an employee away from home overnight is worktime when it cuts across the employee's workday, on the reasoning that the employee is substituting travel for other duties. [29 CFR 785.39]

The hours are not limited to days the employee would otherwise have worked. The regulation gives the example of an employee on a 9-to-5, Monday-to-Friday schedule: travel during those hours still counts when it falls on a Saturday or Sunday, because the hours match the normal working schedule.

Outside the schedule the answer flips, and only for a passenger. As an enforcement policy, the Wage and Hour Division will not treat travel away from home outside regular working hours as worktime when the employee is a passenger on a plane, train, boat, bus, or automobile. [29 CFR 785.39] The wording is worth noticing. The regulation sets this out as a stated enforcement position, held separately from the hours that count as a matter of substance.

Regular meal periods inside the travel window come out of the total. [29 CFR 785.39]

§7The employee who chooses to drive

Where the employer offers public transportation and the employee asks to drive, §785.40 gives the employer a choice: count the time spent driving, or count the time that would have counted as hours worked had the employee used the public conveyance. [29 CFR 785.40]

Pick one measure and put it in the policy. The regulation allows either, but a timekeeping system needs a single rule, and a method the workforce can predict is easier to defend than a case-by-case call made after the trip.

Compare the two before choosing between them. On a long drive the public-conveyance figure will usually be smaller, and on a short one the driving time will be. The choice belongs to the employer either way.

§8Work performed while travelling

Any work the employee is required to perform while travelling counts as hours worked, wherever it happens. [29 CFR 785.41] A report written on a Sunday flight is paid time even though the flight itself would not have been under §785.39.

The regulation also fixes who counts as working by role. Someone who drives a truck, bus, automobile, boat, or airplane is working while driving, and someone required to ride along as an assistant or helper is working while riding. [29 CFR 785.41]

Two exceptions sit inside that. Bona fide meal periods are not counted, and neither is time the employee is permitted to sleep in adequate facilities furnished by the employer. [29 CFR 785.41] Both exceptions depend on what actually happened, so the record needs the break and the sleep period in it.

§9Emergency callouts, and the question the regulation leaves open

§785.36 deals with the night call. Where an employee has gone home after the workday and is then called out to travel a substantial distance for an emergency job for a customer, all of the time spent on that travel is working time. [29 CFR 785.36]

The same section declines to answer a related case. It records that the Divisions are taking no position on whether travel to the job and back home counts as working time when an employee receives an emergency call outside regular hours to return to the regular place of business. [29 CFR 785.36] The regulation says so on its face, and the gap has sat in the text since 1961. If your on-call process turns on it, the answer has to come from your own policy, your state's rule, or a letter of interpretation. The federal regulation does not supply it.

Two words in the section carry more weight than they look. Substantial distance is not defined, so a callout that starts twenty minutes away is a weaker case than one that starts two hours away, and the facts will decide it.

§10Frequently asked questions

Does travel time count toward overtime? Yes, once it is hours worked. Time that counts under the sections above joins the weekly total, and hours past 40 carry the overtime premium. Time that does not count stays out, and a voluntary payment does not pull it in. [29 CFR 785.34, eCFR (16 Oct 2026)]

Does a travel allowance make the commute paid time? Officially the time is still not hours worked. An employer may pay for a commute without the payment turning the drive into time on the clock. [29 CFR 785.34, eCFR (16 Oct 2026)] Treat the money as a benefit payment; nothing in the arrangement alters what counts as time on the clock.

What about an employee who takes a company vehicle home? Two conditions decide it. The use has to sit inside the commuting area the employer normally covers, and a written agreement has to cover it, which can be reached through a representative. [29 CFR 785.34, eCFR (16 Oct 2026)] The Department of Labor states the same pair of conditions on its travel time page. [U.S. Department of Labor, Travel Time topic page, archived 5 Sep 2026]

Do a few minutes at the start of the day count? Insignificant periods of time may be disregarded where they cannot as a practical administrative matter be recorded precisely, a position the courts have called de minimis. It reaches only uncertain periods of a few seconds or minutes, and not time that is fixed and regular. [29 CFR 785.47, eCFR (16 Oct 2026)]

How should travel time appear on a timecard? Separately from worked hours, with the purpose of the trip recorded beside it. The line between a paid trip and an unpaid commute has to be visible in the record, because that record is the evidence a wage audit will ask for. The recordkeeping regulations themselves sit in part 516 of the same chapter. [29 CFR 785.46, eCFR (16 Oct 2026)]

Where does the overtime rate come from once travel pushes the week over 40? From the regular rate. Where the week holds a second rate, a non-discretionary bonus, or a shift differential, rebuild it first and add the premium on top of that figure; our guide to the overtime rate walks through the calculation.