PunchDo You Have to Pay Employees for Travel Time? (FLSA Guide for Field Crews)
Do You Have to Pay Employees for Travel Time? (FLSA Guide for Field Crews)
The short answer: Under the FLSA, a normal home-to-work commute is not paid, but travel between job sites during the workday is paid, and it counts toward the 40-hour overtime threshold. If your crew drives from one site to another on the clock, those miles are hours worked. A time-tracking app like Punch lets a worker punch a travel segment at its own rate, and it folds that time into the overtime math for you.
Travel time is one of the most misunderstood parts of running a field or service crew. Get it wrong and you underpay overtime, which under the FLSA exposes you to back wages, liquidated damages equal to the back wages owed, and attorney fees. This guide walks through the four travel scenarios the Department of Labor cares about, then shows how to track paid travel without a spreadsheet.
The Commute: Not Paid
The starting point is simple. Under 29 CFR 785.35, an ordinary commute from home to the job and back at the end of the day is not work time. It does not matter whether the job site is two miles away or forty. The drive an employee makes to get to work, and the drive home when work is done, is theirs, not yours.
This holds even when the job site changes from day to day. A landscaper who drives to a different property each morning is still on a commute. The location moving does not turn the drive into paid time.
Travel Between Job Sites: Paid
Here is where field crews get tripped up. Once the workday has started, travel from one job site to another is part of the day's work and must be paid. This is spelled out in 29 CFR 785.38: time spent traveling as part of an employee's principal activity, such as travel from job site to job site during the workday, counts as hours worked.
The classic example: a plumber punches in at the first house of the day, finishes the job, then drives across town to the second house. That drive is paid. So is the drive to the third house, and the fourth. The only travel that drops off is the final drive home from the last site, which converts back to an ordinary commute.
The same rule covers the report-to-a-shop pattern. If you require an employee to stop at your shop or a meeting point to pick up tools, a truck, or the day's instructions, the travel from that point to the first job site is paid. The employee's workday started at the shop.
Reporting to a Meeting Point First
Many crews stage out of a yard or shop. Under 29 CFR 785.38, when a worker reports to a designated place to receive instructions, load equipment, or grab a company vehicle, and then travels to the actual work site, that leg of travel is hours worked. The commute rule applies only to the trip from home to that first designated place.
If the crew returns to the shop at the end of the day to drop off the truck, the drive back to the shop is also paid. If they go straight home from the last site instead, that final leg is an unpaid commute.
Special One-Day and Overnight Assignments
Two less common scenarios still come up for growing teams.
A special one-day out-of-town assignment is paid. If an employee who normally works at a fixed local site is sent to another city for a single day, the travel to and from that city counts as time worked under DOL guidance, because it is done for your benefit to meet an unusual assignment. You may subtract the time the worker would have spent on a normal commute.
Overnight travel follows a different rule under 29 CFR 785.39. When a trip keeps an employee away from home overnight, travel time that falls within their normal working hours is paid, even if that travel happens on a day they would not usually work. Time spent as a passenger outside normal working hours generally is not paid.
Why Travel Time Changes Your Overtime Math
Paid travel is not just another line item. It is hours worked, which means it counts toward the 40-hour weekly overtime threshold. A worker who logs 38 regular hours plus 4 hours of paid site-to-site travel has worked 42 hours, and 2 of them are overtime.
It gets more involved when travel is paid at a different rate than regular work. Many employers pay a lower drive-time rate. That is allowed, as long as it meets minimum wage, but it triggers the weighted-average rule in 29 CFR 778.115. When an employee works at two or more rates in one week, the regular rate for overtime is the weighted average: total straight-time earnings divided by total hours worked. Overtime is then paid at 1.5 times that blended rate, not at whichever single rate you feel like using.
This is exactly the kind of calculation that produces quiet, expensive payroll errors when it is done by hand at the end of the week.
How to Track Paid Travel Time the Right Way
The reason travel time causes so much trouble is that most time clocks treat every hour the same. A crew that logs regular hours and travel hours in one bucket forces you to reconstruct the split from memory at payroll time.
Punch handles travel as its own kind of time. When you turn on travel tracking for your organization, an employee can punch a travel segment separately from working a job. Travel is time worked, so it is not geofenced to a site: a crew member driving between locations should never be blocked because they are not standing on a job site. Punch records it wherever they are.
Each worker can carry a separate travel rate. When Punch builds the week's pay, it does the FLSA math the way the regulations require: travel hours count toward the 40-hour overtime threshold, and when a travel rate differs from the regular rate, the overtime premium is calculated on the weighted-average blended rate per 29 CFR 778.115. You see the regular hours, the travel hours, the overtime, and the blended-rate note on the paid breakdown. No side spreadsheet.
A few product details that matter for field teams:
- Travel punches ride the offline queue. If a worker is in a dead zone between rural job sites, the travel segment is recorded when they tap the button and syncs when signal returns.
- A travel pill flags the segment on the timesheet, so a manager approving hours can see at a glance which time was drive time and which was work.
- A geofence verifies the job, never a camera verifies the crew. Punch confirms a job-site punch-in with GPS, not facial recognition or a photo. Travel time needs no location proof at all, because it is movement, not a fixed site. Trust beats surveillance.
The Bottom Line
Paying travel time correctly comes down to one question: has the workday started? A commute before the first job and after the last job is unpaid. Everything in between, including every drive from site to site, is hours worked, and it counts toward overtime. When drive time carries its own rate, the FLSA requires a weighted-average calculation that is easy to get wrong on paper.
Punch tracks travel as first-class time, applies a separate travel rate, and runs the overtime math for you, on every plan, with no per-seat fees and owners always free. If your crew spends real hours behind the wheel, that time belongs on the timesheet.
This article is general information, not legal advice. State rules can be stricter than the FLSA, and California in particular treats travel and drive time differently. Confirm your obligations with an employment attorney or your state labor agency.
Sources: