Travel Time Pay for Hourly Employees: The 2026 Rules

Disclaimer: Informational only, not tax, legal, or financial advice. Federal wage rules are a floor, state rules can require more, and facts vary case by case. For guidance on your situation, check current U.S. Department of Labor guidance or consult an employment attorney.

You drove 40 minutes between two service calls. You flew out on a Sunday for a Monday job. You rode the company van to a site an hour away. Which of those hours does your employer owe you for?

Distance has almost nothing to do with it. Two questions decide it: had your workday already started, and who controlled the trip. What follows is a verdict for each common situation, the dollar math behind it, and what a travel hour is worth once a second pay rate enters the picture.

Your Commute Is Unpaid, and a 1947 Law Is Why

Before 1947, workers were winning claims for the time it took to walk from the mine portal to the coal face. Congress responded with the Portal-to-Portal Act (29 U.S.C. 254), which carved ordinary commuting out of compensable work time.

That is still the default. Home to workplace and back is not hours worked, and the rule holds “whether he works at a fixed location or at different job sites” (29 CFR 785.35). If your boss sends you to a different branch on Tuesday, the longer drive there is still a commute.

Everything below is an exception, and the line between them is your workday. Once your principal work activity has begun, travel is part of the job.

If unpaid minutes are a pattern at your job, the guide to off-the-clock work and unpaid hours covers pre-shift setup, meal breaks, and back wages.

Seven Travel Scenarios and Whether You Get Paid

The short version, with details and dollar math below.

Scenario	Paid under federal law?	Regulation
Ordinary home-to-work commute	No	29 CFR 785.35
Driving between job sites mid-workday	Yes	29 CFR 785.38
Special one-day assignment in another city	Yes, minus your normal commute	29 CFR 785.37
Overnight travel during your normal hours, any day of the week	Yes	29 CFR 785.39
Overnight travel as a passenger outside normal hours	Generally no	29 CFR 785.39
Working while traveling	Yes, always	29 CFR 785.41
Emergency callback travel to a customer	Yes	29 CFR 785.36

Driving between job sites

This is the biggest source of unpaid travel in field work, and the rule is not ambiguous. Travel from one job site to the next during the workday “must be counted as hours worked” (29 CFR 785.38). Your first drive of the day is still a commute. Every drive after that is not.

An HVAC tech at $24 an hour making four calls a day drives three times between them. At 25 minutes a hop, that is 1.25 hours a day, worth $30. Over a five-day week it is $150 that never reaches the timesheet, and roughly $7,800 a year. Same math for home health aides, mobile groomers, flaggers moving between closures, and retail floaters covering two stores.

Special one-day assignment in another city

You are sent out of town and back the same day. That travel is work time, with one deduction most articles skip: your employer may subtract the time your normal home-to-depot commute would have taken, plus your usual meal time (29 CFR 785.37).

The regulation’s own example: a Washington DC employee on a 9-to-5 schedule is sent to New York, leaves at 8 a.m., arrives at noon, works until 3 p.m., and gets home at 7 p.m. All that travel counts, minus the ordinary home-to-station legs.

With real numbers: you earn $21 an hour, travel three hours each way, and your normal commute is 25 minutes each way. Six hours of travel minus about 0.83 hours of substitute commute leaves roughly 5.2 payable travel hours, about $109, on top of the hours you worked once you arrived.

Overnight travel away from home

Travel away from your home community is work time “when it cuts across the employee’s workday,” and the regulation counts “the corresponding hours on nonworking days” too (29 CFR 785.39).

That second half is the part people miss. Work 9 to 5 Monday through Friday, and travel between 9 and 5 on a Saturday is paid. The calendar day does not matter; the clock does.

Say you make $19 an hour and fly out Sunday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on that schedule. Those four hours are compensable, worth $76, or time-and-a-half if your week already has 40 hours on it.

The passenger carve-out

As a matter of enforcement policy, the Wage and Hour Division “will not consider as worktime that time spent in travel away from home outside of regular working hours as a passenger on an airplane, train, boat, bus, or automobile” (29 CFR 785.39).

So a 9 p.m. flight where you watch a movie is generally unpaid under federal law. A 9 p.m. drive where you are behind the wheel is not, because driving is work.

If you choose to drive when your employer offers public transportation, the employer may count either your actual driving time or the hours the offered transport would have taken (29 CFR 785.40). Picking a 9-hour drive over a 2-hour flight does not buy you 9 paid hours.

Working while you travel

Any work you are required to perform while traveling is hours worked (29 CFR 785.41). Driving the crew van counts. So does answering the dispatch phone from the passenger seat, filling out job reports on a tray table, or taking a client call at the gate. For a lot of people this swallows the passenger carve-out: if you were productive on that flight because someone asked you to be, the clock was running.

Emergency callback

You are home for the night and get called back. The regulation is specific about which version of that is paid: if you have finished your day’s work and are called out at night to travel a substantial distance to an emergency job for one of your employer’s customers, “all time spent on such travel is working time” (29 CFR 785.36).

The narrower case is unsettled. If the emergency call brings you back to your own regular place of business instead, the Wage and Hour Division takes no position, so the answer depends on your state and your employer’s policy.

Company Vans, Shuttles, and Who Controls the Trip

The Employee Commuting Flexibility Act of 1996 amended the Portal-to-Portal Act to settle a fight over company vehicles. Commuting in an employer-provided vehicle is not compensable if the travel is within the normal commuting area for the employer’s business and use of the vehicle is subject to an agreement between you and your employer (29 U.S.C. 254). That agreement need not be written; established employer or industry practice can supply it. Incidental activities, like fueling the truck on the way in, are excluded too.

The carve-out breaks the moment the trip includes something integral and indispensable to your job. Loading equipment before you leave. Swinging by a supply house for parts. Detouring to collect two crew members. Do any of that and your workday has started, so the rest of the drive is on the clock.

California is different. Under Morillion v. Royal Packing Co. (Cal. 2000), an employer that requires workers to ride company transportation and forbids them from driving themselves owes pay for that ride. The test is control, not distance. A shuttle you are free to skip is not the same as a bus you are required to board.

What Your Travel Hour Is Actually Worth

“Compensable” is only half the answer. The rate decides how much money you see.

Travel time can be paid at a lower rate. Compensable travel must be paid at least the applicable minimum wage (federal, state, or local, whichever is highest), but not necessarily at your regular rate. Employers can set a separate, lower travel rate as long as they tell you in advance. Oregon’s labor bureau spells this out directly: a lower travel rate is allowed if the employer clearly advises you of the policy ahead of time.

Two rates in one week change your overtime. Work at two or more rates in a single workweek and your overtime “regular rate” becomes the weighted average: total straight-time earnings divided by total hours (29 CFR 778.115).

Say you put in 36 hours at $25 an hour plus 8 hours of travel at $14, for 44 hours total.

Straight-time earnings: (36 × $25) + (8 × $14) = $900 + $112 = $1,012
Regular rate: $1,012 ÷ 44 = $23.00/hr
Overtime premium: 4 hours × $11.50 = $46
Total: $1,058

Compare a week where all 44 hours paid $25: $1,100 in straight time plus a $50 overtime premium (4 hours × $12.50), or $1,150. The $92 gap has two parts. Most of it ($88) is the discount on your 8 travel hours. The rest ($4) is quieter: the low travel rate dragged your regular rate from $25.00 down to $23.00, shrinking the premium on overtime hours you earned doing your actual job.

If your paycheck mixes rates, run it through the blended overtime calculator or read the walkthrough on blended overtime with two pay rates.

Travel hours count toward 40. Compensable travel stacks with worked hours for the FLSA’s 40-hour threshold, so it is often the thing that tips a week into overtime. The overtime calculator shows where the line falls, and how to calculate overtime pay covers the mechanics. If those hours land in overtime, the temporary federal no-tax-on-overtime deduction may apply to the premium portion.

Mileage is a separate claim. Travel pay is wages for your time; mileage covers what it costs to run your vehicle. Federal law does not require reimbursement at all, though several states (California among them) do, and required expenses can never push your effective earnings below minimum wage. For 2026 the IRS business standard mileage rate is 72.5 cents per mile through June 30 and 76 cents from July 1 through December 31. Plenty of guides quote a single annual figure and will be wrong for half the year.

States That Pay More Than the Federal Floor

The FLSA is a floor, not a ceiling. Three states go well past it.

California uses the control test from Morillion. Compulsory travel beyond your normal commute is compensable, and every compensable hour must be paid at least the state minimum wage, $16.90 an hour in 2026, with many cities higher. California also layers on daily overtime, so travel hours interact with the daily overtime rules after 8 hours in a day. Current floors for every state are in the 2026 minimum wage guide.

Washington has the broadest rule in the country. Under state policy and Port of Tacoma v. Sacks (Wash. Ct. App. 2021), all out-of-town travel on the employer’s behalf is hours worked: the drive to the airport, the wait in the terminal, the time in the air, even outside normal working hours. That contradicts the federal passenger carve-out outright, and it cannot be bargained away in a collective agreement.

Oregon draws a bright line the federal rules never did: if your employer requires you to report to an alternate work site more than 30 miles from your normal fixed location, that travel is generally paid. Oregon also confirms the lower-travel-rate rule and does not mandate mileage reimbursement.

Other states add overtime wrinkles that change what a travel hour is worth once you cross a threshold. The state-by-state overtime rules rundown is the place to check yours.

How to Log Travel Time So It Holds Up

Enforcement here is real money. A federal court ordered one Philadelphia home care agency to pay more than $7 million in back wages and damages to 1,230 workers, largely for leaving work-related travel out of wage calculations. A Worcester, Massachusetts home health company paid over $272,000 for paying aides only for time spent with patients and not for the drives between them.

Records decide those cases. Log each leg separately with departure and arrival times, and log the unpaid commute too, because it is the number the substitute-commute deduction gets measured against. Put mileage next to the time, from the odometer or the map, since time pay and mileage are two different claims. Note which rate applied to which hours, the only way to check the weighted-average math later. If you work more than one job, keep them separate: each has its own workweek and its own commute.

A tracking app pays for itself here. ClockWage44 logs shifts across multiple jobs on-device, supports a per-shift rate override for travel hours, and keeps per-day notes so “drove Site A to Site B, 3:10 to 3:45” stays attached to the entry. Its paycheck engine resolves the whole week, blended overtime rate included, so you can compare against what actually landed in your account.

If you find hours you were never paid for, write it down, raise it with your employer in writing, then file with the DOL Wage and Hour Division if it is not resolved. FLSA back-pay claims generally have to be brought within two years, or three for willful violations (29 U.S.C. 255).

Blended Overtime Calculator: Check the weighted-average rate when travel is paid differently than your regular work.
Overtime Pay Calculator: See where travel hours push your week past 40.
Timesheet Calculator: Add up drive legs and shift hours across a full week.
Off-the-Clock Work and Unpaid Hours: What to do when hours go unpaid.
The Best Ways to Track Work Hours: Build a record you control.

References

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I get paid for driving to work?

No. Ordinary home-to-work travel is not work time under the Portal-to-Portal Act, even if you report to a different location than usual that day.

Do I get paid for driving between job sites?

Yes. Once your workday has started, travel from one site to the next is part of your principal activity and counts as hours worked under 29 CFR 785.38.

Can my employer pay me a lower rate for travel time?

Usually yes, as long as the travel rate is at least the applicable minimum wage and you were told in advance. But two rates in one week means your overtime is figured on the weighted average of both, which lowers what your overtime hours are worth.

Is travel time included in overtime?

Yes. Every compensable travel hour counts toward the 40-hour weekly threshold, so travel can be the thing that pushes you into time-and-a-half.

Do I get paid for flying on a Sunday for a work trip?

If the flight falls within the hours you normally work on a weekday, yes. 29 CFR 785.39 counts those corresponding hours on non-working days. Passenger time outside your normal hours generally is not paid under federal law.

Am I paid for commuting in a company vehicle?

Generally no, if the drive is within your normal commuting area and there is an agreement to use the vehicle. It becomes paid time if you do real work during the trip, such as loading equipment or picking up crew.

What are California's travel time rules?

California uses a control test. If the employer requires you to travel a specific way, such as a mandatory company bus, that time is hours worked, and it must be paid at least the state minimum wage.

Is mileage reimbursement the same as travel time pay?

No. Travel pay is wages for your time; mileage covers vehicle costs. Federal law does not require mileage reimbursement, though some states do, and expenses can never push your earnings below minimum wage.