Your technician spends 45 minutes driving to the first job site each morning, sits through a two-hour Saturday safety certification, and answers customer calls from the truck on the way home. You pay for the eight hours on site. The question that should keep you up at night is whether you owe for the other three — because the Department of Labor recovered more than 259 million dollars in back wages for nearly 177,000 employees in fiscal year 2025, and unpaid travel and training time is one of the most common violations behind those checks.
The rules live in a short document called DOL Fact Sheet 22, which summarizes how the Fair Labor Standards Act defines "hours worked." The FLSA requires you to pay nonexempt employees for every hour they work, including overtime at time and a half past 40 in a week. Travel and training sit in the gray zone where small employers most often guess wrong. Here is how to get each scenario right.
The One Principle Behind Every Rule
Courts and the DOL apply a single test: time counts as hours worked when it primarily benefits the employer. An ordinary commute primarily benefits the employee — it lets you live where you choose — so Congress excluded it from hours worked in the Portal-to-Portal Act. Travel that serves your business, on the other hand, is your time and your payroll cost.
Everything below is a special case of that principle. Two notes before we start. First, these are federal rules for nonexempt (overtime-eligible) employees; exempt salaried employees are paid the same weekly salary regardless of hours. Second, your state can be stricter than the FLSA, and several are — more on that near the end.
The Ordinary Commute Is Not Paid Time
Home-to-work travel at the start and end of the day is not hours worked under 29 CFR 785.35. Your employee's 45-minute drive from home to your office or shop, and the drive back, is their time even if the commute is long.
The 2026 update: mid-day trips home are still a commute
Hybrid schedules raised a new question: if a nonexempt employee works at the office in the morning, drives home for lunch and an afternoon of remote work, then drives back for an evening meeting, is that mid-day driving paid? In 2026 opinion letters, the DOL said no. Ordinary home-to-work travel does not become compensable just because it happens in the middle of the workday. The agency even named it a third category of non-compensable time during the workday, alongside bona fide meal breaks and off-duty time.
The key qualifier is "ordinary." The travel must still look like a commute that primarily benefits the employee. That leads directly to the exceptions.
When a commute becomes paid time
A drive that looks like a commute can still be compensable when the facts change its character:
- Work performed during the commute counts. If your employee takes required customer calls, joins a meeting, or runs a work errand while driving home, the time spent on that work is paid — though courts look at whether the activity is truly work rather than a brief incidental contact.
- Travel as a principal activity counts. For employees whose job is travel itself — delivery drivers, home health aides moving between patients, traveling sales staff — the driving is the work, not the commute to it.
- Emergency call-backs during the commute can count. If you call an employee who is already heading home and send them to an emergency job, the travel to that job is an extension of the workday.
- A required stop can convert the trip. If you require employees to report to the shop first — to load materials, pick up the company van, or get assignments — travel from the shop to the job site is paid work time, and in some situations the home-to-shop leg is affected too.
When in doubt, ask the core question: did I require this travel for my business, or did the employee choose it to get to work?
Travel During the Workday Is Paid Time
Once the workday has started, travel from job site to job site is hours worked. Your HVAC tech driving between three service calls, your caregiver moving between clients, your crew lead hauling materials from one project to another — all of that driving is on the clock, because it is part of your principal business activity.
The start and end of the day need more care. Travel from home to the first worksite and from the last worksite back home is generally treated as a non-compensable commute. But two common setups change the answer:
- Shop-first policies. If the crew must report to your yard every morning before dispatch, the clock arguably starts at the yard. Many contractors in this situation simply pay from the yard to the last drop-off and treat only the home-to-yard legs as commute time.
- Distant or special assignments. Sending an employee who normally works in town to a far-flung site for a day can make the extra travel compensable, particularly if you would otherwise pay travel for the trip.
Document your policy in writing, apply it consistently, and make sure your timekeeping system has a way to capture job-site driving separately from on-site hours. That separation matters at audit time, as we will see below.
One-Day Out-of-Town Trips: Pay Everything Except the Normal Commute
When an employee travels to another city and back within a single day — a training session, a client meeting, a supply run — the DOL treats it as a special one-day assignment. The rule: count all the travel time as hours worked, except the time the employee would have spent on an ordinary home-to-work commute.
A concrete example makes this mechanical. Suppose your office manager normally commutes 30 minutes each way. You send her to a one-day vendor training two hours away. She leaves home at 7 a.m. and returns at 7 p.m. Her compensable travel time is the 12 hours away from home minus her normal one-hour round-trip commute, or 11 hours — plus any overtime implications for the week. The commute deduction is taken once, not per leg, and it reflects her actual normal commute, not an average.
Overnight Travel: Normal Hours Count Even on Days Off
Travel that keeps an employee away from home overnight follows the most misunderstood rule in this whole area, found at 29 CFR 785.39. The principle: travel away from home is compensable when it cuts across the employee's normal working hours — whether that travel happens on a workday or a day off.
Walk through the pieces:
- Travel during normal hours is paid, any day of the week. If your employee normally works Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and flies to a conference on Sunday from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m., the Sunday hours from 2 to 5 p.m. are compensable because they fall within normal working hours. The hour from 5 to 6 p.m. is not.
- Passengers outside normal hours are off the clock. Time spent as a passenger on a plane, train, bus, or car outside regular working hours is not hours worked, as long as no work is performed.
- Drivers are always on the clock. An employee who drives — rather than rides — is working regardless of the hour, because driving is itself work. Choosing to drive instead of fly converts evening and weekend driving into paid time.
- Any work performed while traveling is paid. Answering emails from the airport, prepping the presentation on the flight, or taking a client call from the hotel counts whenever it happens.
A federal appeals court confirmed the stakes in a case involving employees on remote assignment: travel during normal working hours is compensable and must be counted toward overtime. Employers sometimes assume that paying a flat travel stipend or per diem covers the wage obligation. It does not. A per diem reimburses expenses; it does not buy out hours worked.
One more nuance worth knowing: time spent waiting — at the airport, for a connecting flight — during normal working hours on an overnight trip is generally compensable, while bona fide sleep and meal periods away from home generally are not, within limits the regulations spell out.
Training Time Is Paid Unless All Four Tests Are Met
Lectures, meetings, training programs, and similar activities count as hours worked unless every one of four conditions in 29 CFR 785.27 is true:
- Attendance is outside the employee's regular working hours.
- Attendance is in fact voluntary.
- The course is not directly related to the employee's job.
- The employee performs no productive work during the training.
Miss even one, and the whole session is paid time. That single sentence resolves most disputes. Your mandatory Saturday safety certification fails test two. The evening workshop on skills used in the employee's current role fails test three. Training scheduled during the shift fails test one. An after-hours session where trainees handle real customer orders fails test four.
Two fact patterns deserve special attention:
- Training required for the current job is almost always paid. Courses your business requires, training on your equipment or procedures, and preparation for responsibilities the employee already holds are directly related to the job. Even state-required continuing education for a license the employee uses in your business is generally compensable, because it maintains qualifications for the job you employ them to do.
- Genuinely voluntary, unrelated learning can be unpaid. The classic example is an employer offering an after-hours course that teaches skills for a different occupation — say, a bookkeeping class offered to warehouse staff — where nobody is required to attend and no work gets done. All four tests genuinely pass, so the time is not hours worked.
There is also a narrow special rule at 29 CFR 785.31: if an employee voluntarily attends an independent school or night course on their own initiative, outside working hours, even job-related coursework need not be counted — because the training is the employee's own project, not yours. Paying tuition assistance for such a course does not by itself convert it into hours worked.
The Overtime Trap: These Hours Count Toward 40
Here is where small violations become expensive. Every compensable travel and training hour counts toward the 40-hour weekly overtime threshold. An employee who works 38 hours on site, then drives three paid hours between job sites and sits through a two-hour paid training, has 43 hours — three of them at time and a half.
Three mistakes compound the damage:
- Excluding travel and training from the overtime calculation. Some employers pay these hours at straight time in a separate bucket. The FLSA does not allow that; compensable hours are compensable hours.
- Averaging across weeks. Overtime is computed on a single workweek. A 44-hour travel week followed by a 36-hour week still owes four overtime hours for the first week.
- Forgetting the regular rate. Overtime is time and a half of the regular rate, which includes most nondiscretionary bonuses and shift differentials — not just the base hourly wage.
Penalties raise the stakes further. Willful violations can trigger back wages plus an equal amount in liquidated damages, effectively doubling the bill, and the statute of limitations stretches from two years to three. The DOL assessed close to 59 million dollars in civil penalties in fiscal year 2025 alongside the back wages. Accurate time records are your best defense, because without them courts may accept the employee's reasonable estimate of hours.
Your State May Be Stricter Than Federal Law
The FLSA is a floor, not a ceiling, and several states build higher. California is the leading example: its "subject to the employer's control" test can make travel compensable in situations federal law would excuse, California courts have held employers to pay for essentially all required out-of-town travel time without the federal normal-hours limitation, and state law separately requires reimbursement of all necessary business expenses. California also imposes daily overtime past eight hours, so a long travel day can trigger premium pay even in a short week.
Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, Washington, and others each add their own wrinkles on travel pay, training pay, expense reimbursement, or daily overtime. Before you finalize a policy from this article, check your state's wage orders or ask local employment counsel. If you operate in multiple states, write the policy to the strictest state you touch — that is cheaper than maintaining five versions.
A Five-Step Compliance Playbook for Small Employers
You do not need a legal department to get this right. You need a written policy, a timekeeping habit, and books that separate these hours from the noise.
1. Put the policy in writing. Spell out which travel is paid, how one-day and overnight trips are calculated, which training is paid, and how employees report the time. Have every nonexempt employee acknowledge it. A written policy you actually follow is evidence of good faith; an unwritten practice is a swearing contest.
2. Give travel and training their own time codes. If your timekeeping app only has "clock in" and "clock out," travel hours get estimated after the fact — usually wrong. Add codes for job-site travel, overnight travel, and training, and require same-day entry. Mobile clock-in with location notes is ideal for field crews.
3. Schedule around the overtime threshold. You may rearrange schedules within a workweek to offset expected travel hours — for example, shifting an employee to four nine-hour days before a Friday training day. What you cannot do is move hours into a different week or bank them as future time off (private employers generally cannot offer comp time instead of overtime).
4. Keep travel pay visible in your books. Book travel time, training time, and the resulting overtime as distinct payroll categories rather than burying them in gross wages. When a DOL investigator or your accountant asks how a 46-hour week breaks down, the answer should be one report away, not a reconstruction project. Clean categories also reveal the true cost of distant jobs and frequent training, which feeds better bids and budgets.
5. Audit yourself once a year. Pull a sample of travel weeks and training rosters, recompute the hours under the rules above, and fix underpayments before an investigator finds them. Keep payroll records for at least three years and time records for at least two, as the regulations require. Self-correction does not guarantee immunity, but good-faith compliance efforts weigh heavily against liquidated damages.
Keep Your Payroll Records Audit-Ready
Travel and training disputes are rarely about bad intent. They are about blurry records: a mileage log with no hours, a training roster with no times, a payroll report that cannot separate drive time from desk time. When the hours are ambiguous, the tie goes to the employee's reasonable estimate — and your defense budget goes to reconstructing what your books should have shown.
That is fundamentally a bookkeeping problem, and it is solvable. Distinct payroll categories for travel, training, and overtime, reconciled against timekeeping every pay period, turn a wage-hour audit from an excavation into a report. If your bookkeeping lives in plain-text accounting, every one of those categories is a transparent, version-controlled account you can inspect, diff, and explain — no black boxes between you and your own payroll data. The Beancount documentation shows how employers structure payroll and expense accounts, and the dashboard views in Fava make the resulting reports easy to review each month.
Simplify Your Financial Management
As you tighten up travel and training pay, maintaining clear financial records is what turns a policy into proof. Beancount.io provides plain-text accounting that gives you complete transparency and control over your payroll and expense data — no black boxes, no vendor lock-in. Get started for free and see why developers and finance professionals are switching to plain-text accounting.
