If your technicians, installers, or field reps check messages and call customers before driving to their first stop, you may already owe them for the drive — and you might not be tracking a minute of it. That's the uncomfortable takeaway from Opinion Letter FLSA2026-10, issued by the U.S. Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division on July 22, 2026. The letter draws a surprisingly sharp line through the morning routine of every mobile worker: some pre-commute activities are unpaid, others are paid, and the paid ones can pull the entire drive to the first job site into compensable hours.
For a small business running even a handful of field employees, the difference is real money. An hour of scheduling calls plus a 45-minute drive, five days a week, is roughly nine hours of newly recognized work time per employee per week — much of it potentially at overtime rates. Here's what the letter actually says, why the distinctions matter, and how to adjust your policies and timekeeping before a wage claim adjusts them for you.
What Opinion Letters Are (and Why You Should Care)
A DOL opinion letter is the Wage and Hour Division's official written answer to a specific employer's question about how the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) applies to a real set of facts. It isn't a statute or a regulation, but it carries weight in two practical ways:
- It signals how the DOL will approach enforcement. If an investigator audits your payroll, the reasoning in these letters is the framework they'll apply.
- It can provide a good-faith defense. An employer who reasonably relies on an opinion letter addressing materially similar facts may be shielded from certain damages under the Portal-to-Portal Act — but only if your facts genuinely match.
FLSA2026-10 arrived alongside a companion letter, FLSA2026-9, which deals with hybrid office workers' mid-day commutes. Together they form the DOL's most detailed recent guidance on when travel time is work time. This post focuses on the field-service scenario, with a short detour into the hybrid letter at the end.
The Scenario: A Field Service Engineer's Morning
The employer that requested the letter described a field service engineer with no fixed office. The engineer works out of an employer-provided vehicle, installing and servicing equipment at customer sites. A typical morning looks like this:
- Between 7 and 8 a.m., the engineer receives electronic service requests — pages or messages listing the day's assignments.
- Before or shortly after leaving home, the engineer calls customers to schedule appointment windows and coordinates with other engineers about who covers what.
- The engineer then drives from home directly to the first customer location.
The employer asked: which parts of this routine count as "hours worked" under the FLSA?
If this sounds like your HVAC techs, appliance repair crew, home health schedulers, cable installers, or pest control routes — it is. The fact pattern is the default morning for most of the mobile workforce.
The Legal Framework in Plain English
Three doctrines drive the analysis, and understanding them helps you apply the letter to your own facts rather than guessing.
The Portal-to-Portal Act: ordinary commuting is unpaid
Since 1947, the Portal-to-Portal Act has excluded ordinary home-to-work travel from compensable time, along with activities that are "preliminary or postliminary" to an employee's principal work. Your office employee's morning drive is on their own dime, no matter how long it is. The Employee Commuting Flexibility Act of 1996 extended this to employees who commute in employer-provided vehicles, so long as the vehicle use is within the normal commuting area and any related activities are merely incidental to using the vehicle.
The "integral and indispensable" test: some pre-shift work is a principal activity
An activity doesn't have to be the core job to be compensable. If it's integral and indispensable to the employee's principal duties — something the job can't be performed without — it's a principal activity in its own right. Sharpening knives at a meatpacking plant is the classic example. Scheduling the appointments that make up a service route, it turns out, is another.
The continuous workday doctrine: the first principal activity starts the clock
Here's the multiplier. Under the continuous workday rule, once an employee performs their first principal activity of the day, the workday has begun — and, generally, everything from that point until the last principal activity ends is compensable, travel included. A commute that would have been unpaid becomes paid because work started before the engine did.
What the DOL Decided
Applying that framework, FLSA2026-10 splits the engineer's morning into three rulings:
Receiving pages and messages: not compensable
Passively receiving service requests is incidental to using the employer's vehicle for commuting, the DOL concluded, and the Employee Commuting Flexibility Act says incidental activities don't convert a commute into work time. Glancing at a dispatch list is closer to knowing where to drive than to performing the job.
Calling customers and coordinating with colleagues: compensable
Actively calling clients to schedule appointments and coordinating coverage with other engineers is different. Those calls are integral and indispensable to the principal job of servicing equipment — no scheduled appointment, no service call. In the scenario presented, this work could consume up to an hour each morning. That hour is work time, wherever it happens: at the kitchen table, in the driveway, or on the road.
The drive to the first stop: compensable once the first call is made
Because the client calls are a principal activity, the first call starts the continuous workday. The DOL held that the travel that follows is compensable:
- Call made at home, then drive? The entire drive to the first customer is paid time.
- Call made mid-drive? The travel time after that call is paid.
The DOL also noted employer control as a factor: in this scenario the employer dictated the schedule and required substantial work immediately before and after the drive, which stripped the trip of its "ordinary commute" character. The reasoning echoes the primary-beneficiary idea that runs through wage-and-hour law — an ordinary commute primarily benefits the employee getting to work, but a drive sandwiched between required work tasks primarily benefits the employer.
Why "Just a Few Minutes" Doesn't Save You
Employers sometimes assume short pre-shift tasks are excusable as de minimis — too trivial to track. Be careful. The de minimis doctrine covers a few seconds or minutes of irregular, administratively difficult-to-record time. It does not cover a predictable, daily block of scheduling calls, and courts have grown skeptical of the doctrine precisely because modern timekeeping makes recording easy. An hour of calls is nowhere near de minimis, and even ten predictable minutes every morning is a poor candidate. Worse, if the call starts the continuous workday, the exposure isn't the ten minutes — it's the ten minutes plus the forty-minute drive behind it.
What This Costs If You Get It Wrong
Run the numbers on a single technician earning $28 an hour:
- 30 minutes of pre-commute calls + 40-minute drive to the first stop = about 70 minutes per day of unrecorded work time.
- Across a five-day week, that's nearly 6 hours — likely pushing the employee past 40 hours and into time-and-a-half.
- Over the FLSA's two-year lookback (three years for willful violations), unpaid wages, an equal amount in liquidated damages, and attorney's fees stack quickly — multiplied by every technician on the same routine.
Wage-and-hour claims are also collective-action magnets: one technician's claim tends to become every technician's claim, because they all share the same morning.
A Compliance Checklist for Field-Service Employers
The letter is actually good news if you act on it, because it tells you exactly where the lines are.
1. Map the morning routine
Write down, step by step, what your field employees actually do between waking up and arriving at the first job: reading dispatches, confirming appointments, loading parts, planning routes, answering customer texts. Classify each step honestly against the incidental-versus-integral line. Passively receiving assignments leans unpaid; actively scheduling, coordinating, or preparing leans paid.
2. Decide when you want the workday to start — then design for it
You have legitimate design choices:
- Shift scheduling work to dispatchers or office staff, so field employees receive a finished route and simply drive (unpaid commute, workday starts on arrival).
- Or embrace the early start: have employees clock in when they begin calls, and pay for the calls and the drive. Sometimes the flexibility is worth the cost.
What you can't do is require the calls and not pay for them — or quietly benefit from "voluntary" early work you know is happening. Work you suffer or permit is work, even if you didn't order it.
3. Fix your timekeeping
Mobile employees need a way to record work that starts at home. Modern options include mobile clock-in apps with geofencing, or a simple rule: log your start time at the first call. Train supervisors that "clock in when you arrive at the first site" is no longer a safe blanket instruction. Timekeeping should capture reality, not the policy you wish were reality.
4. Put the policy in writing
Document which activities are compensable, when employees should clock in, and that off-the-clock work is prohibited without authorization — and then enforce it symmetrically. A written policy that managers routinely ignore is worse than none, because it shows you knew.
5. Check your state's rules
The FLSA is a floor. California, for example, uses a control-based test under which more travel time is compensable than federal law requires, and several states reject the de minimis doctrine entirely. Multistate field operations need a state-by-state review.
6. Remember the hybrid companion letter
FLSA2026-9, issued the same day, holds that a hybrid office employee's mid-day drive between home and office remains an ordinary, unpaid commute — even when the employee splits the day voluntarily to dodge rush hour — provided the employee is fully relieved of duties during the drive and the arrangement genuinely serves the employee. The pairing is instructive: employee-chosen flexibility stays unpaid; employer-required work bookending a drive makes it paid. Control is the hinge.
The Bookkeeping Angle: Reclassified Time Is a Ledger Event
Wage-and-hour compliance isn't only an HR problem — it lands directly in your books. When you reclassify pre-commute calls and first-stop travel as paid time, several accounts move at once: gross wages rise, overtime premiums appear, payroll tax accruals grow, and your job-costing changes because an hour of drive time now attaches to the day's first service call. If you bill clients based on loaded labor rates, those rates need updating too.
Tracking these categories separately — regular hours, overtime, travel time, payroll tax accruals per employee — is what turns a compliance scramble into a clean audit trail. If a DOL investigator or plaintiff's attorney asks how you paid for travel time in March, the answer should be a query, not a shoebox. Precise, dated, line-item payroll records are also your best evidence that a good-faith reliance defense is genuine.
Keep Your Payroll Records Audit-Ready
As you tighten your travel-time policies, make sure your financial records can prove what you actually paid and why. Beancount.io offers plain-text accounting that's transparent, version-controlled, and AI-ready — every payroll entry is a readable line in a ledger you own, with full history of every change. Get started for free and see why developers and finance professionals are switching to plain-text accounting.