Travel Time Pay Rules: When Drive Time Is Compensable

The same dispatch policy can be lawful under the federal floor and an eight-figure class action in California. That federal-state divergence is the heart of travel-time wage exposure for multi-state service businesses, and it's anchored in two recent decisions:

• Federal: Villarino v. Pacesetter Personnel Service (11th Cir., Dec. 2025) held that optional employer-provided transit and optional tool pickup are NOT integral and indispensable to the principal activity.
• California: Morillion v. Royal Packing (Cal. Supreme Court, 2000) held the opposite for mandatory employer-provided transit. Compensable as "hours worked" under the IWC Wage Orders' "subject to control" test, with no Portal-to-Portal Act exclusion limiting state-law claims. Overton v. Walt Disney (2006) narrowed the rule to genuinely required transit — but parking-and-shuttle policies employees can't realistically decline still trigger compensability under post-2018 California Labor Commissioner opinion letters.

Travel-time class actions in California settle in the $10M–$50M range for conduct that's compliant federally.

The federal floor is the Portal-to-Portal Act of 1947 (29 USC §254). It excludes the ordinary home-to-work commute, but 29 CFR §§785.33–785.41 carve out four categories of compensable travel:

• Emergency callbacks to a customer job at night (§785.36)
• Special one-day assignments in another city — sales meetings, training, customer visits out of region (§785.37)
• Site-to-site travel during the workday — between customers, project sites, patient homes (§785.38)
• Overnight business travel during regular working hours — including the corresponding hours on weekends (§785.39)

There's a federal safe harbor for employer-provided commute vehicles. The 1996 Employee Commuting Flexibility Act amended §254(a) to let the commute stay non-compensable — but only when the vehicle's use is governed by a written agreement between employer and employee, within the normal commuting area. Most service businesses fail the written-agreement test by accident.

This guide walks each §785 category in detail with verbatim regulatory text, the continuous-workday doctrine from IBP v. Alvarez that controls when a workday actually begins, the California rule and its operational traps, state variations in New York, Washington, and Oregon, the field-service and home-health patterns that drive most claims, the regular-rate trap under 29 CFR §778.115 that compounds compensable drive time into overtime exposure, and the GPS-and-app-log recordkeeping postures that hold up under the Mt. Clemens burden-shifting rule.

Quick reference

• Ordinary commute (home to first work site): NOT compensable federally under 29 CFR §785.35, regardless of distance or whether the work site is the same each day. Same rule in most states.
• Site-to-site travel during the workday: COMPENSABLE federally under §785.38. Universal across states.
• Emergency callbacks at night: Travel to the emergency customer site IS compensable per §785.36; travel back to the regular workplace is "no DOL position."
• Special one-day out-of-city assignments: Compensable travel time per §785.37, minus normal commute + meal periods.
• Overnight business travel as passenger: Compensable only during regular working hours per §785.39 — including the corresponding hours on weekends. Working-while-traveling per §785.41 is compensable independent of the overlap.
• Mandatory employer-provided transit in California: COMPENSABLE under Morillion — the employee is "subject to the control" of the employer. Voluntary transit (per Overton) is not.
• Pre-shift system logins, dispatch, tool pickup: Begin the continuous workday under IBP v. Alvarez — subsequent travel between locations becomes compensable.

The 5 Most Expensive Travel-Time Mistakes

Before the rule mechanics, the patterns that actually drive litigation. Each is a routine audit finding for service businesses that crossed the line without realizing it.

1. Mandatory yard time without paying the yard-to-customer drive. Service businesses (HVAC, plumbing, electrical, locksmith) that require employees to start the day at the yard for tool pickup, dispatch, or vehicle inspection have begun the workday at the yard. Under 29 CFR §785.38, the yard-to-first-customer drive is compensable. Multi-state operators with "yard time isn't paid" policies regularly owe back wages across every state — and in California, the exposure compounds because Morillion's "subject to control" test extends compensability even to optional yard policies the employer has made effectively mandatory.

   Cited cases

   • Villarino v. Pacesetter Personnel Service, Inc., No. 23-10645 (11th Cir. Dec. 5, 2025)
     11th Circuit Court of Appeals — Optional employer-provided transit + optional tool pickup NOT integral and indispensable under federal Portal-to-Portal Act

2. Mandatory employer-provided transit in California (the Morillion trap). Agricultural workers, construction crews, warehouse shuttles — any policy that REQUIRES employees to ride employer-arranged transit owes the ride time under California IWC Wage Orders. Morillion v. Royal Packing has been extended through Labor Commissioner DLSE opinion letters since 2018 to cover parking-lot-to-building shuttles when the lot is mandatory. Overton v. Walt Disney provides the narrow safe harbor — but only for genuinely optional transit, not for "voluntary on paper, fired in practice" policies.

   Cited cases

   • Morillion v. Royal Packing Co., 22 Cal.4th 575 (2000)
     California Supreme Court — Mandatory employer-provided transit compensable under CA "subject to control" test
   • Overton v. Walt Disney Co., 136 Cal.App.4th 263 (2006)
     California Court of Appeal — Voluntary employer-provided shuttle NOT compensable; distinguishes Morillion on required-vs-permitted axis

3. The §785.39 overnight-travel passenger trap. A non-exempt employee flies Saturday afternoon for a Monday business meeting. The flight is 3pm–6pm; the employee normally works Monday–Friday 9–5. Federal rule (§785.39): the 3pm–5pm overlap with regular working hours is compensable; the 5pm–6pm portion is not. Same rule on Sundays. Holiday/weekend "corresponding hours" gets missed routinely, and the working-while-traveling exposure under §785.41 (email, calls, laptop work during the flight) sits on top of it.

4. Pre-shift system logins and dispatch that quietly start the continuous workday. A home-health nurse logs into the EMR before driving to the first patient; a delivery driver receives the route on the dispatch app before leaving home; a salesperson syncs the CRM at the kitchen table. Each of these is a "principal activity" under IBP v. Alvarez, and the time AFTER the login becomes compensable — including the drive to the first stop that the employer has been treating as commute. The exposure is invisible until someone audits the app logs alongside the time records.

5. GPS records that prove the drive time the employer didn't pay for. Vehicle telematics + mobile clock-in geolocation creates the exact record that Mt. Clemens burden-shifting requires. When records show the truck was at customer sites at 8am and the employee's first time entry is 9am, the employer's "we estimate the drive time" testimony loses. GPS is a defense if the employer pays for the time it shows; it's a plaintiff's exhibit if the employer doesn't.

Federal Baseline: The Portal-to-Portal Act

The Portal-to-Portal Act of 1947 (29 USC §254) is the statute that exempts ordinary commuting and most pre/post-shift activities from FLSA compensable time. The broader pre/post-shift framing — security checks, donning/doffing, after-hours messaging — sits in our off-the-clock work laws by state guide; this article focuses specifically on the travel-time subset. The relevant exclusions:

1. "Walking, riding, or traveling to and from the actual place of performance of the principal activity" — the ordinary commute.
2. "Activities which are preliminary to or postliminary to said principal activity" — pre/post-shift activities.

The critical exception: an activity that's integral and indispensable to the principal activity remains compensable. The Supreme Court's test from Integrity Staffing v. Busk, 574 U.S. 27 (2014):

"An activity is integral and indispensable to the principal activities that an employee is employed to perform if it is an intrinsic element of those activities and one with which the employee cannot dispense if he is to perform his principal activities."

Translated: would the principal work be impossible without this activity? If yes, compensable. If the activity could be skipped without preventing the principal work, not compensable under federal law — even if the employer requires it.

The 1996 Employee Commuting Flexibility Act safe harbor

The Portal-to-Portal Act was amended by the Employee Commuting Flexibility Act of 1996 (Pub. L. 104-188, §§ 2101–2103, 110 Stat. 1928). The amendment added §254(a)'s proviso that commute travel in an employer-provided vehicle is NOT a principal activity, but only when:

1. The travel is within the normal commuting area for the employer's business; AND
2. The use of the vehicle is subject to a written agreement between the employer and the employee or the employee's representative.

The agreement requirement is the load-bearing gate. A service business that hands keys to a technician without a written take-home-vehicle agreement doesn't get the §254(a) safe harbor, and the commute time can become compensable if the vehicle's contents (tools, parts, dispatch device) shift the activity toward "integral and indispensable."

29 CFR §§785.33–785.41 — the four federal categories of travel time

The DOL regulation that interprets Portal-to-Portal Act travel-time treatment for FLSA purposes. The travel sections live in Subpart C of Part 785 (Application of Principles), not Subpart D (which covers recordkeeping). The sections define four practical categories.

§785.35 — Home to work (ordinary commute) → NOT compensable

"An employee who travels from home before his regular workday and returns to his home at the end of the workday is engaged in ordinary home to work travel which is a normal incident of employment. This is true whether he works at a fixed location or at different job sites. Normal travel from home to work is not worktime."

The closing sentence is the bright line. The "fixed location vs. different job sites" clause is load-bearing for service businesses — a plumber driving from home to a customer's house is on uncompensated commute time even if the customer is 90 minutes away. The rule has been read broadly: long commutes, commutes that vary day-to-day, and (with the §254(a) safe harbor) commutes in employer-provided vehicles all generally remain non-compensable.

§785.36 — Emergency callbacks → compensable (limited)

"If an employee who has gone home after completing his day's work is subsequently called out at night to travel a substantial distance to perform an emergency job for one of his employer's customers all time spent on such travel is working time."

The regulation includes an explicit DOL non-position: travel back to the regular workplace (rather than to a customer site) for an emergency is "not addressed" at the federal level. Practical effect: a service technician called out at 2am for an emergency customer repair gets paid for the drive; the same technician called back to HQ to retrieve specialized equipment is in a gray zone. The standby on-call time BEFORE the emergency call may also be compensable depending on the Skidmore totality test; see our on-call pay rules guide for the federal §785.17 framework + the engaged-to-wait / waiting-to-be-engaged distinction that decides whether the pre-call standby itself is hours worked.

§785.37 — Special one-day out-of-city assignment → compensable

The regulation uses a Washington-DC-based employee assigned to NYC as its example: depart 8am, arrive noon, work through 3pm, return at 7pm. Key holdings: such travel "cannot be regarded as ordinary home-to-work travel" and IS compensable because it serves "the employer's benefit and at his special request." Two deductible portions: (a) travel between home and the transit depot (home-to-work category retained), and (b) normal meal periods.

Practical effect: when a non-exempt employee takes a one-day trip to another city — sales meeting, customer visit out of region, HQ training day — the travel hours (less normal commute + meal periods) are compensable. The "in another city" language has been read to mean genuine inter-jurisdictional travel, not a longer-than-usual trip within the regular commuting area.

Worked example. A non-exempt employee based in Boston normally works 9am-5pm with a 30-minute commute each way. The employer sends her on a one-day assignment to Chicago: leave home 6:30am, arrive Logan Airport 7am, flight 8am-10:30am (Eastern; 9:30am Central on arrival in Chicago), arrive client office 11am, work through 4pm with a 30-minute lunch, depart client office 5pm, flight 7pm-9:30pm (Central; 11:30pm Eastern on arrival in Boston), home by midnight. Compensable hours per §785.37: 7am-midnight = 17 hours, minus (a) the 30-minute home-to-Logan commute (deducted as normal commute), and (b) the 30-minute lunch period (deducted as normal meal). Net compensable: 16 hours. At a $35/hour regular rate, that's $560 in straight-time plus, if the week totals more than 40 hours, weighted-average overtime under §778.115. A single one-day trip can easily generate the overtime premium the employer's payroll system isn't watching for.

§785.38 — Travel that is all in the day's work → compensable

"Time spent by an employee in travel as part of his principal activity, such as travel from job site to job site during the workday, must be counted as hours worked. Where an employee is required to report at a meeting place to receive instructions or to perform other work there, or to pick up and to 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."

The meeting-place / tool-pickup language is what makes mandatory yard time + yard-to-customer drives compensable in field service businesses. Once the workday has begun at the yard, every subsequent drive between work sites is compensable until the last site of the day ends the workday. The end-of-day boundary: returning to the employer's premises continues the workday; going home after the last customer ends it.

§785.39 — Travel away from home (overnight) → compensable during work-hour overlap

"Travel that keeps an employee away from home overnight is travel away from home. Travel away from home is clearly worktime when it cuts across the employee's workday ... The time is not only hours worked on regular working days during normal working hours but also during the corresponding hours on nonworking days ... Regular meal period time is not counted. As an enforcement policy the Divisions 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."

The "corresponding hours on nonworking days" rule is counter-intuitive but load-bearing: a Monday–Friday 9-to-5 employee flying Saturday from 10am-12pm is owed those 2 hours; the same flight 9pm-11pm (outside regular hours, even on a workday) is not. Regular meal periods are deducted — but only if they're bona fide meal periods where the employee is completely relieved of duty per 29 CFR §785.19. A "meal period" during which the employee answers a customer call, reviews a deck, or otherwise works isn't a bona fide meal period and can't be deducted; see our meal and rest break laws by state guide for the federal-vs-California meal-period framework that controls when the deduction applies. Non-overlapping passenger time is not compensable as a passenger.

§785.40 + §785.41 — Driving vs. passenger, and work-while-traveling

§785.40 covers the employee who's offered public transportation but requests permission to drive: the employer may count either the driving time OR the equivalent flight time as hours worked. §785.41 establishes that any work the employee is required to perform while traveling is compensable, and that the driver of a vehicle (truck, bus, automobile, boat, airplane) is always working while riding — except during bona fide meal periods or sleep in adequate employer-furnished facilities. A passenger who answers email, takes calls, or works on a laptop during the flight is owed the working time even when the bare travel wouldn't be compensable.

The continuous workday doctrine — IBP v. Alvarez

The Supreme Court in IBP, Inc. v. Alvarez, 546 U.S. 21 (2005), held that once the workday has begun via the first compensable "integral and indispensable" activity, all time until the last compensable activity is part of the continuous workday — including travel between work-site components.

Application to travel time:

• A field technician who picks up tools at the yard has begun the workday at the yard; the yard-to-customer drive is compensable.
• A home-health nurse who logs into the EMR before driving has begun the workday at the home office; the drive to the first patient is compensable from that point.
• A meat-processing worker who dons protective gear at the locker room has begun the workday at the locker room; the walk to the production floor is compensable.

The continuous workday is what makes the line between "commute" (non-compensable) and "site-to-site travel" (compensable) turn on when the workday actually began, not on the employer's clock-in policy.

Villarino v. Pacesetter Personnel Service — the December 2025 11th Circuit clarification

Villarino v. Pacesetter Personnel Service, Inc., No. 23-10645 (11th Cir. Dec. 5, 2025), is the cleanest recent application of the Integrity Staffing test to a travel-time fact pattern. Pacesetter is a temporary labor agency. Workers reported to a labor hall each morning to pick up assignments, then either rode employer-provided transit to the jobsite or made their own way there. Tools were sometimes employer-supplied, sometimes jobsite-supplied, sometimes employee-brought.

The Eleventh Circuit's holdings (affirming the district court):

1. Travel time — time spent waiting for and riding employer-provided transit from the labor hall to the jobsite was NOT integral and indispensable, because workers were free to travel using personal transportation. The employer-provided transit was an optional service.
2. Tool pickup — time spent collecting and returning employer-supplied tools was NOT compensable, because tools were not indispensable to the work: some jobs required no tools, some jobsites supplied tools, employees could bring their own.
3. Transportation cost deductions — the employer could deduct transportation expenses from wages because the transit served employees' commuting convenience, not the employer's business interests.

Why it matters. Villarino reinforces a strict reading of the federal "indispensable" test: optional employer-provided transit doesn't become integral just because the employer offers it. The decision sits squarely on the federal-floor side of the federal-vs-California divide — under California law, the analysis would turn on whether the transit was REQUIRED (not whether it was OPTIONAL), and the same facts could flip to compensable under Morillion.

California — Broader Than FLSA

California's IWC Wage Orders define "hours worked" much more broadly than the FLSA. The state explicitly rejects the federal Portal-to-Portal Act limitations for state-law claims, and the resulting "subject to control" test has produced the largest travel-time settlements in the country.

The California "control" test

Under California IWC Wage Orders, compensable time includes any period when the employee is "subject to the control of an employer" — much broader than the federal "integral and indispensable" standard. The test focuses on whether the employee is free to use the time as they choose, not whether the activity is part of the principal work. The "subject to control" language appears across all IWC Wage Orders (Wage Order 7 for mercantile, 14 for agriculture, 16 for construction); the doctrine is consistent regardless of sector.

Morillion v. Royal Packing Co., 22 Cal.4th 575 (2000)

Royal Packing required field workers to ride company-provided buses from a designated pickup point to remote agricultural fields. Workers couldn't leave the bus once boarded, couldn't use the time for personal purposes, and couldn't decline the bus and drive themselves (the fields had no public access).

The California Supreme Court held: the bus travel time IS compensable as "hours worked" under California IWC Wage Order No. 14-80 (the agricultural wage order). Workers were "subject to the control" of the employer during the time. The court explicitly rejected the federal Portal-to-Portal Act treatment for state-law claims.

The court also held that "subject to control" by itself is sufficient — the employee does not also have to be "suffered or permitted to work" during the controlled time. The two prongs of the IWC "hours worked" definition operate independently.

Practical effect. Any California employer that REQUIRES employees to ride employer-provided transit (shift buses, work-site shuttles, mandatory carpools, employer-mandated vanpools) owes time for the ride. Voluntary employer-provided transit — rideshare credits, optional shuttle programs — generally remains non-compensable per the Overton distinguisher.

Overton v. Walt Disney Co., 136 Cal.App.4th 263 (2006) — the voluntary-transit safe harbor

Disney employees were assigned to park in a satellite lot one mile from the employee entrance and rode a Disney-provided shuttle from the parking lot to the entrance. 90% of employees used the shuttle. A representative sued seeking compensation for the shuttle ride time.

The California Court of Appeal held that Disney did NOT owe pay for the shuttle time. The case fell outside Morillion's mandate because Disney did not REQUIRE employees to park in the satellite lot — the remaining 10% used alternate transportation that bypassed the shuttle.

Why it matters. Overton is the "required vs. permitted" distinguisher that limits Morillion's reach. The same shuttle service is compensable in California when mandatory; non-compensable when optional. The 90/10 actual-usage split doesn't matter — what matters is whether the employer requires the route. The post-2018 DLSE opinion-letter line has narrowed Overton by holding that informally-but-effectively mandatory transit (employees would be fired for not following the parking policy) shifts the analysis back to Morillion.

Troester v. Starbucks — applied to travel

Troester v. Starbucks Corp., 5 Cal.5th 829 (2018), rejected the federal de minimis doctrine for California state-law claims. Applied to travel time, this means: even small amounts of pre-shift / post-shift travel are compensable in California when the travel is required or under the employer's control. A 3-minute walk from the employer-mandated parking lot to the clock-in terminal, repeated daily, is compensable; the federal ~10-minute-per-day de minimis threshold doesn't apply.

Things California employers consistently miss

• Mandatory yard time + yard-to-customer drives. The classic Morillion-extension pattern. Service businesses with "start the day at the yard" policies for tool/inventory loading have begun the workday at the yard under federal §785.38 meeting-place reasoning; in California, Morillion's "subject to control" test compounds the federal rule because the employer's control during the yard-to-customer drive is itself sufficient even without the meeting-place hook. A 30-minute yard routine + 45-minute drive to the first customer, repeated daily across a 10-technician workforce over 3 years (CA unfair-competition statute), is roughly 540 unpaid hours per technician — at $30/hour, $16,200 per employee and $162,000 across ten employees in straight-time exposure alone, before §510 overtime recompute and §203 waiting-time penalties.
• Effectively-mandatory parking shuttles. Overton's safe harbor is narrower than employers assume. Per the post-2018 DLSE opinion-letter line, parking policies that employees can't realistically decline (no employee parking near the building, prohibitive guest-lot fees, mandatory satellite-lot assignment) trigger Morillion compensability even when the formal policy is "voluntary." The 90% / 10% Overton usage split that worked for Disney doesn't generalize to employers where the 10% who decline face operational penalties.
• Pre-shift dispatch on mobile apps starts the continuous workday. A home-health nurse logging into the EMR before driving to the first patient; a delivery driver receiving the route on the dispatch app before leaving home; a field technician syncing the CRM at the kitchen table. Each is a "principal activity" under IBP v. Alvarez, and the time from app-login forward becomes compensable — including the drive to the first stop the employer has been treating as commute. The exposure is invisible until someone audits the app login timestamps alongside the time records.
• §785.39 overlap on Saturday/Sunday business travel. California follows the federal §785.39 framework for travel-away-from-home, but Troester's no-de-minimis layer means any compensable working-while-traveling per §785.41 (email, calls, laptop work during the flight) is fully compensable in California, no matter how small. A 9-to-5 employee on a Sunday 8pm-11pm flight who answers two work emails owes those minutes; the federal de-minimis 10-minute threshold doesn't apply to California state-law claims.

State-by-state — beyond the federal floor

California is the strictest, but several states have hours-worked definitions that go beyond Portal-to-Portal Act exclusions. The table covers the states where state-law travel-time exposure differs meaningfully from the FLSA baseline.

Industry-Specific Patterns

Travel-time litigation is concentrated in industries where the pre-shift / multi-site work patterns are systematic. Each has its own characteristic exposure mode.

Field service — multi-site service technicians

Plumbers, HVAC technicians, electricians, locksmiths, appliance repair, pest control — the standard pattern: drive from home to first customer, between customers throughout the day, home from the last customer.

Federal: home → first customer = §785.35 commute (NOT compensable). First customer → second customer = §785.38 site-to-site (COMPENSABLE). Last customer → home = §785.35 commute (NOT compensable). If the employee picks up tools at a yard, receives dispatch via app, or logs into a system before driving, the §785.38 meeting-place principle starts the workday earlier.

California: the yard-policy compensability depends on whether the policy is REQUIRED (per Morillion, compensable) or OPTIONAL (per Overton, not). Informally-mandatory policies (everyone uses the yard, you'd be fired if you didn't) trigger compensability under the post-2018 DLSE line.

Exposure pattern: multi-state operators with uniform "yard time isn't paid" policies typically have material California exposure even when the same policy is compliant elsewhere. The fix is per-state policy ratification or a strict-everywhere posture.

Mileage reimbursement pairs operationally with compensable drive time. Once a drive is compensable hours-worked, the vehicle expenses incurred on that drive are also reimbursable — under federal §531.35 (cannot reduce wages below minimum), under CA Labor Code §2802 (necessary expenditures + IRS standard mileage rate or actual cost), and under similar state expense-reimbursement statutes. See our mileage reimbursement requirements by state guide for the per-state framework. Field-service businesses that pay for drive time but don't reimburse mileage face the second-largest single source of field-service wage-and-hour exposure after compensable-hours itself.

Home health and home care

Home-health nurses, aides, caregivers drive between patient homes throughout the day. The federal Domestic Service rule (29 CFR §552) historically exempted some home-care workers from FLSA overtime, but a 2013 amendment (effective Jan. 1, 2015 after litigation delay) narrowed the exemption — drive time between patient locations is now generally covered for home-care workers employed by third-party agencies.

The pre-shift app-login trap. EHR / scheduling-app logins before driving begin the continuous workday under IBP v. Alvarez. The next drive — whether to the first patient or to the agency office — becomes compensable. Home-health agencies that don't track app-login timestamps face audit exposure when the app vendor's logs surface in litigation.

Construction

Crews meet at a yard, project office, or designated meeting point at the start of the day; drive to the project site; perform work; drive back. Federal: if the meeting point is mandatory (tool pickup, crew assembly, safety briefing), the workday begins there — §785.38 controls. If employees report directly to the project site, §785.35 commute applies. The 1996 ECFA preserves the commute-in-employer-vehicle exception under written agreement.

California IWC Wage Order 16 (construction industry) has additional reporting-time and travel-time provisions; mandatory crew meetings trigger compensable travel from the meeting point under CA law more readily than under federal law.

Trucking and CMV operations

Commercial Motor Vehicle drivers are subject to FMCSA hours-of-service rules separately from FLSA. The intersection: FLSA treats CMV driving as compensable hours worked, but the FLSA "motor carrier exemption" (29 USC §213(b)(1)) exempts most interstate CMV drivers from FLSA overtime — which means travel time is "compensable" for minimum-wage purposes but not for overtime calculations. State law (CA, OR, WA) sometimes restores the overtime entitlement; this is a per-state question for trucking specifically.

Overnight and multi-day business travel

The §785.39 overlapping-hours rule applies. A salaried-non-exempt employee traveling Sunday afternoon for a Monday-morning meeting is NOT compensated for passenger travel outside regular working hours. The trap: any work-while-traveling (email, calls, laptop) is compensable independent of the overlap per §785.41.

Multi-State and Remote Workers

Travel-time liability follows the employee's work location, not the employer's HQ. Same rule as overtime, breaks, and off-the-clock. The patterns:

• A federal-floor employer's "yard time isn't paid" policy may comply federally when transit and tool pickup are genuinely optional, but creates California exposure for California-domiciled employees with mandatory yard-pickup routines.
• A multi-state field-service business needs either (a) per-state policies that account for Morillion in California, or (b) a strict-everywhere policy that pays yard + travel-to-first-site in every state. The marginal cost of strict-everywhere is small; the elimination of policy complexity is large.
• Remote workers traveling for in-person meetings face the §785.39 overlapping-hours rule based on their regular working hours, which the employer's HQ time zone doesn't control. A West-Coast employee traveling East for a meeting has different overlap windows than an East-Coast colleague traveling to the same meeting.

The strict-everywhere defense: pay all yard time, all dispatch / pre-shift app-login time, all site-to-site drive time, and all working-while-traveling time. A California-baseline travel-time policy satisfies every other state's rule. The marginal labor cost is small; the elimination of per-state exposure is large.

Recordkeeping and the Mt. Clemens Rule

29 CFR §516.2 requires the employer to record all hours worked, including compensable travel time. The Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery (1946) burden-shifting rule applies: if drive-time records are inadequate, the employee can establish unpaid hours by "just and reasonable inference," and the burden shifts to the employer to prove actual hours worked.

For field-service businesses, the practical implication is GPS + vehicle telematics + mobile clock-in geolocation. The same technology that proves the employee was at the customer site also creates the federal-required record. GPS data is admissible and beats "we estimate the drive time" testimony in both federal and California courts. The defensive posture: capture the time the records will eventually surface anyway.

Don't round away the drive time the records would have captured. Camp v. Home Depot U.S.A., 84 Cal. App. 5th 638 (Cal. Ct. App. 2022), held that time-clock rounding is impermissible under California law when the employer has actual exact-time data — and GPS / dispatch-app / mobile clock-in records ARE actual exact-time data. The California Supreme Court granted review in February 2023 (S277518); Camp is persuasive-only authority during review, but most California employer-side counsel already advise clients to stop rounding compensable drive time. See our time clock rounding rules guide for the See's Candy → Donohue → Camp → Woodworth doctrinal chain plus the pending-Supreme-Court status. See our recordkeeping requirements by state guide for the §516 retention windows and the per-state extensions.

Connection to Overtime — the Regular Rate Trap

When travel time IS compensable, it counts as "hours worked" for the FLSA overtime regular-rate calculation under 29 USC §207(a) — and the resulting overtime liability is the second-largest source of travel-time exposure after the compensable-hours question itself. Three independent failure modes layer here, each one a routine audit finding for field-service operations.

Failure mode 1: compensable travel pushes the workweek over 40 hours

A field technician works 36 billable hours across the week and drives 6 hours between customer sites (compensable under §785.38). Total hours worked: 42. The employer owes 2 hours at 1.5× the regular rate — but the payroll system, configured to compute overtime against billable hours only, computes 0. This is the canonical missed-overtime pattern for piece-rate or flat-fee-per-stop pay structures: the compensable drive time was never tracked as "hours worked" for overtime purposes, so the 40-hour threshold was silently crossed. Multiplied across a multi-technician workforce over a 2-3 year statute period, the back-pay math reaches six figures even at modest hourly rates. When the resulting FLSA-required overtime is correctly identified, the 0.5× premium portion also qualifies for the OBBB § 225 federal deduction at the worker's filing — see our no tax on overtime by state guide for whether the deduction also reaches state taxable income in the worker's work-state.

Failure mode 2: two-rate weighted-average regular rate

When the employer pays a different rate for drive time than for billable work — $15/hr drive, $30/hr billable, for example — 29 CFR §778.115 permits the differential structure but requires the weighted-average regular rate for overtime, not the higher rate. The math:

Worked example. A technician works 30 billable hours at $30/hr and 12 drive hours at $15/hr in a workweek. Total straight-time pay: $30 × 30 + $15 × 12 = $900 + $180 = $1,080. Total hours: 42. Regular rate (weighted average): $1,080 / 42 = $25.71/hr. Overtime hours: 2. Overtime premium: 2 × $25.71 × 0.5 = $25.71 (the half-time premium on top of the straight-time pay already received). Total pay: $1,080 + $25.71 = $1,105.71.

The common mistake: treating the $30/hr rate as the "regular rate" for overtime computation. This overstates overtime owed in scenarios where drive time pushes the workweek over 40 hours but understates when the technician hits 40 hours from billable work alone (because the drive premium isn't being computed at all). 29 CFR §778.115's weighted-average rule is non-waivable; an alternative two-rate structure under §778.419 requires the employee's advance agreement before the workweek and gets used rarely in practice.

Failure mode 3: non-discretionary bonus + compensable travel = layered regular-rate recompute

When the technician also earns a non-discretionary bonus (per-stop commission, monthly performance bonus, quarterly safety bonus), the bonus must be included in the regular rate per 29 CFR §778.208–§778.209 — and apportioned across all compensable hours in the bonus period. Compensable travel hours get apportioned the same as billable hours; the bonus per hour is computed on TOTAL compensable hours, not just billable hours. See our overtime rules by state Mistake #3 (bonus inclusion in regular rate) for the cluster-anchor coverage, and our how to calculate retro pay guide for the §778.303 retroactive-recompute mechanic when bonus inclusion is corrected late.

The combined failure pattern in the field is: piece-rate-per-stop technician, unpaid drive time, monthly safety bonus. All three failure modes stack — drive time is uncompensated, the 40-hour threshold is missed when drive is added back, and the bonus apportionment understates the regular rate when drive hours are excluded from the divisor. A clean unwinding requires recomputing the regular rate for every workweek in the statute period with drive time included, then doubling under §216(b) liquidated damages, then layering §203 waiting-time penalties for any technician who has separated since.

Recent Changes (2024–2026)

• December 2025 — 11th Circuit's Villarino v. Pacesetter decision. Reinforces strict reading of Integrity Staffing's "indispensable" test: optional employer-provided transit and optional tool pickup are NOT integral and indispensable to the principal activity. Federal-floor employers gained a clear citation. California employers should NOT read Villarino as relaxing the CA "subject to control" analysis — Villarino is federal law; Morillion controls state-law claims.
• Post-Morillion California Labor Commissioner DLSE opinion letters. Multiple letters since 2018 clarifying employer-mandated parking + shuttle scenarios. The DLSE opinion-letter archive is the primary source for the post-Morillion extension cases — particularly the line that informally-but-effectively mandatory transit triggers compensability even under nominally "voluntary" policies.
• Post-pandemic remote work patterns. Pre-shift system logins, "first email of the day" timing, and EMR / scheduling-app access points are driving new travel-time-adjacent litigation in California. The continuous-workday doctrine reaches further when the employee's "first principal activity" can happen at the kitchen table.
• DOL Wage and Hour Division guidance updates. Ongoing clarification of the continuous-workday rule for hybrid/remote workers — specifically when the workday begins/ends if the first compensable activity is a system login from a home office. DOL Fact Sheet #22 remains the canonical "hours worked" reference; state-specific guidance from CA DIR, NY DOL, and WA L&I has tightened in the same direction.

Frequently Asked Questions

If You Discover You've Been Doing This Wrong

Travel-time audits routinely uncover accumulated exposure: unpaid yard time, missing site-to-site drive records, weekend / overnight-travel overlap that wasn't computed, working-while-traveling that wasn't captured. The unwinding playbook:

1. Audit by employee work location. Pull time records, GPS telemetry, dispatch-app logs, and mobile clock-in logs for the full statute period (2 years federal, 3 if willful, 4 in California under the unfair-competition law). For California employees, every minute counts under Troester. Identify the gap between "first principal activity timestamp" and "clock-in timestamp" — that gap is usually unpaid pre-shift travel.

2. Fix the time-capture system. Time records must show all hours worked, including drive time. Three working postures: (a) yard clock-in + yard-to-customer drive auto-captured; (b) mobile app clock-in at first stop + retroactive drive-time entry; (c) GPS-driven automatic compensable-travel computation. For California operations, posture (a) or (c) is the only defensible option.

3. Pay back wages voluntarily. Self-correcting before a claim is filed is admissible as evidence of good faith. Federal recoveries include back pay plus liquidated damages (effectively double); California adds the §203 waiting-time penalty + unfair-competition treble damages exposure. Voluntary payment can eliminate the multipliers.

4. Fix the dispatch-app and EMR-login flow. A handbook policy doesn't protect the employer if the app logs show employees logged in before the recorded clock-in time. Operational fixes: lock app access to within the compensable window, or align the time-record start with the actual first-login timestamp.

5. Consult counsel for class-action exposure. Rough rule: more than 10 employees in California with consistent unpaid pre-shift travel patterns, or any systematic site-to-site under-tracking across the workforce, crosses into class-action territory. Tyson Foods representative-evidence rule + Mt. Clemens burden-shifting make class certification dramatically easier when employer records are deficient.

The Through-Line

Travel-time exposure has three failure modes: mandatory pre-shift activities that quietly start the continuous workday (yard pickup, dispatch, app login), mandatory employer-provided transit in California (the Morillion trap), and passenger overnight travel during overlapping work hours (the §785.39 trap). Get all three right with good time records — GPS + app-login timestamps + mobile clock-in geolocation — and the Mt. Clemens burden-shifting rule works in your favor. Get any one wrong, and the back-pay math compounds across years and employees until the exposure dwarfs the underlying convenience.

For multi-state field-service operators, the highest-leverage move is the same as for overtime, breaks, sick leave, and off-the-clock: standardize to the strictest applicable rule. California-baseline travel-time capture (yard time + site-to-site drives + working-while-traveling) satisfies every other state's requirement. The marginal labor cost is small; the elimination of per-state policy complexity and the defensive posture against the Mt. Clemens burden shift are large.

Sources and Authorities

Federal

• Portal-to-Portal Act, 29 USC §254
• 29 CFR §785.33 — Travel time, general
• 29 CFR §785.35 — Home to work; ordinary situation
• 29 CFR §785.36 — Emergency callbacks
• 29 CFR §785.37 — Special one-day assignment in another city
• 29 CFR §785.38 — Travel that is all in the day's work
• 29 CFR §785.39 — Travel away from home community
• 29 CFR §785.40 — Private automobile in travel away from home
• 29 CFR §785.41 — Work performed while traveling
• DOL Fact Sheet #22: Hours Worked Under the FLSA
• Employee Commuting Flexibility Act of 1996, Pub. L. 104-188

State

• California DIR — Hours Worked definition
• California IWC Wage Order 14 (Agricultural)
• California IWC Wage Order 16 (Construction)
• NY DOL — Labor Standards FAQ
• Oregon BOLI — Travel time
• Washington L&I — Hours Worked

Case law

• Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co., 328 U.S. 680 (1946) — burden-shifting rule when employer recordkeeping is inadequate.
• IBP, Inc. v. Alvarez, 546 U.S. 21 (2005) — donning/doffing protective gear IS integral and indispensable; continuous workday doctrine.
• Integrity Staffing Solutions v. Busk, 574 U.S. 27 (2014) — post-shift security screenings NOT compensable under FLSA.
• Tyson Foods v. Bouaphakeo, 577 U.S. 442 (2016) — representative evidence admissible to establish class-wide damages.
• Villarino v. Pacesetter Personnel Service, Inc., No. 23-10645 (11th Cir. Dec. 5, 2025) — optional employer-provided transit and optional tool pickup NOT integral and indispensable under federal law.
• Morillion v. Royal Packing Co., 22 Cal.4th 575, 94 Cal.Rptr.2d 3, 995 P.2d 139 (Cal. 2000) — mandatory employer-provided transit compensable in California under "subject to control" test.
• Overton v. Walt Disney Co., 136 Cal.App.4th 263 (Cal. Ct. App. 2006) — voluntary employer-provided transit not compensable; distinguishes Morillion on required-vs-permitted axis.
• Troester v. Starbucks Corp., 5 Cal.5th 829 (2018) — California rejects federal de minimis doctrine.