Fact Check: Travel Time Pay: Portal-to-Portal Act, 29 CFR §§785.33–.41, California Morillion, and the December 2025 Villarino Decision

§254(a)(1) excludes commute; §254(a)(2) excludes preliminary/postliminary. The "integral and indispensable" carve-out is judicial, anchored in Steiner v. Mitchell, 350 U.S. 247 (1956), and restated in Integrity Staffing.

ECFA was Title II of the Small Business Job Protection Act of 1996 (Pub. L. 104-188); §§ 2101–2103. The agreement requirement is the operative condition for the §254(a) safe harbor.

Subpart C (Application of Principles) houses the travel-time sections. Subpart D handles recordkeeping at §§785.46–785.48.

Research quotes the regulation verbatim. The "fixed location or at different job sites" clause is the load-bearing carve-out — a 90-minute commute is still commute.

The "no position" sentence is in the regulation's text, not an extrapolation: "The Divisions are taking no position on whether travel to the job and back home by an employee who receives an emergency call outside of his regular hours to report back to his regular place of business to do a job is working time."

The DC/NYC example is the canonical illustration in §785.37. The "employer's benefit and at his special request" framing and "integral part of the 'principal' activity" framing are verbatim.

The meeting-place / tool-pickup language is verbatim. The end-of-day boundary example (5pm finish → 8pm job → 9pm return to employer's premises = all working time, vs. 8pm finish → going home = home-to-work after 8pm) is also drawn directly from the regulation's text.

The "corresponding hours on nonworking days" rule and the Monday-Friday 9-to-5 example are verbatim from §785.39's text. The DOL enforcement-policy non-compensability for passenger time outside regular working hours is also verbatim.

The "offered public transportation but requests permission to drive" framing is verbatim. §785.40 explicitly grants the employer the choice between actual driving time and equivalent public-transit hours.

Driver-always-working and the two exceptions (bona fide meal period; sleep in adequate facilities) are verbatim from §785.41.

§785.19's "completely relieved from duty" language is verbatim. The §785.39 travel-away-from-home meal-period deduction depends on this test.

The "subject to control" / "suffered or permitted to work" language appears in §2(K) of each IWC Wage Order (e.g., Wage Order 7 §2(K) for mercantile; Wage Order 14 for agriculture; Wage Order 16 for construction). Lab. Code §1198 codifies the IWC's authority.

§510(a) sets the daily/weekly/double-time/7th-day thresholds. The interaction with compensable travel is that yard time + drive time + billable hours can push a California technician across the daily 8-hour threshold even when billable hours alone do not.

§2802 reimbursement obligation pairs operationally with compensable drive time — once a drive is compensable hours-worked, vehicle expenses incurred on that drive are reimbursable. The IRS standard mileage rate is the safe-harbor benchmark.

Wage Order 16's existence and the construction-industry coverage are verifiable on the California DIR site. The specific "additional reporting-time and travel-time provisions" claim is operationally accurate but the research does not pull the verbatim wage-order text for §16's travel-time clauses. Suggestion: the partial status is acceptable as long as the research body keeps the generalized framing rather than purporting to quote the wage order.

NY DOL Pamphlet P715 (Wage and Hour Manual) confirms the broader-than-federal "required to be available" framing. 12 NYCRR §142-2.1(b) is the New York Codes, Rules and Regulations source.

WAC 296-126-002's "hours worked" definition is verbatim. Washington L&I has applied the rule to compensable employer-mandated transit and pre-shift logistics in administrative actions.

ORS 653.010's "required or permitted" plus prescribed-location language tracks the same "subject to control"-flavored framing as California IWC Wage Orders.

COMPS Order Rule 1.9 is the current Colorado hours-worked definition. The 2020 revision expanded coverage of pre/post-shift activities; travel-time application is underdeveloped in published case law.

The treble-damages multiplier applies to all wage-and-hour claims including travel time. The Massachusetts rule itself tracks federal Portal-to-Portal exclusions; the practical effect on travel-time exposure is the 3× multiplier.

The IL Minimum Wage Law (820 ILCS 105) defers to federal travel-time treatment; the IL Wage Payment and Collection Act (820 ILCS 115) governs the collection mechanics. The combination is class-cert-friendly but not substantively broader than federal on travel time.

Alaska has not extended hours-worked treatment beyond federal Portal-to-Portal; the state's notable feature is the daily-overtime overlay that can compound compensable-travel exposure.

NRS §608.018 sets daily-overtime threshold for workers under the 1.5× minimum-wage line. Travel-time treatment defaults to federal.

The 2013 final rule (78 Fed. Reg. 60454) narrowed the domestic-service exemption; the rule was challenged and ultimately upheld in Home Care Association of America v. Weil, 799 F.3d 1084 (D.C. Cir. 2015). Effective date became Jan. 1, 2015 (originally Jan. 1, 2015, with a brief litigation delay).

§213(b)(1) is the Motor Carrier exemption from §207 overtime only — minimum-wage compensable-hours treatment still applies. The state-law restoration of overtime for in-state CMV drivers exists in California (Lab. Code §510 plus the Mendiola v. CPS Security line) and similar states.

§213(b)(12) is the small-employer agricultural overtime exemption. Morillion's compensable-hours holding stands independently — agricultural workers in California are owed for the controlled bus time even if their employer falls under §213(b)(12) for overtime purposes.

§207(a)(1) is the federal overtime requirement. Cross-verified against the FLSA overtime cluster research's §207 verification.

§778.115's weighted-average formula is the controlling federal rule for differential-rate-per-task workers including drive-vs-billable rate splits.

§§778.208 and 778.209 are the regular-rate inclusion and apportionment rules. Compensable travel hours are included in the divisor when bonuses are apportioned, which can dilute the bonus-per-hour rate but also extend overtime exposure.

§778.303 is the federal rule that retroactive rate increases drag overtime premiums along with them. Applies to back-wage settlements when travel time is added back retroactively.

§531.35 is the FLSA anti-kickback regulation that limits deductions for vehicle expenses; the rule pairs operationally with the compensable-drive-time analysis for field-service operations.

§516.2(a) is the operative recordkeeping list. Inadequate records trigger the Mt. Clemens burden-shift.

§255(a) sets the 2/3-year statute. §216(b) sets liquidated damages at "an additional equal amount" — doubling the back-pay recovery. §260 is the good-faith defense.

§17208 sets the 4-year UCL limitations window. The UCL is the standard mechanism for reaching unpaid-wage exposure beyond the §255(a) federal 3-year max.

NY Lab. Law §198 sets the 6-year statute — longest in the country for wage-and-hour claims.

MGL c.149 §150 sets mandatory treble damages — automatic, not discretionary. The 3-year statute limits the reach of the multiplier.

§206.5 voids any release of an employee's wage claim absent Labor Commissioner or court approval. The rule is the operational gate on voluntary-payment settlements for California state-law claims.

§203 caps the waiting-time penalty at 30 days. For separated employees with unpaid travel-time exposure, this stacks on top of the back-wage recovery and the §510 overtime recompute.

Cross-referenced as the on-call standby framework that sits atop §785.36's emergency-callback rule; Skidmore is the Supreme Court source for the totality-of-the-circumstances analysis.

Procedural posture: U.S. Supreme Court, decided June 10, 1946. The burden-shifting holding is the canonical Supreme Court rule on inadequate employer time records.

Procedural posture: U.S. Supreme Court, consolidated appeals from the 9th and 1st Circuits, decided Nov. 8, 2005. The case held that donning unique protective gear is integral and indispensable and that walk time between locker room and production floor is compensable under the continuous-workday rule.

Procedural posture: U.S. Supreme Court, decided Dec. 9, 2014. The court held that post-shift security screenings at Amazon warehouses were not compensable because they were not integral and indispensable to the principal warehouse work; employer requirement alone is insufficient.

Procedural posture: U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, published decision affirming district court summary judgment. The court's opinion confirms the three holdings (travel time, tool pickup, transportation-cost deductions) and the "free to use personal transportation" factual basis.

Procedural posture: U.S. Supreme Court, decided March 22, 2016. The case involved meat-processing workers and donning/doffing time; the Court permitted representative evidence to establish class-wide damages when individual records were inadequate.

Procedural posture: U.S. Supreme Court, decided Dec. 4, 1944. Cited as cross-reference for the engaged-to-wait / waiting-to-be-engaged analysis underlying §785.36's emergency-callback framework.

Procedural posture: California Supreme Court, decided April 6, 2000. Full reporter citation includes both the California Reporter and the Pacific Reporter parallel cites. The case explicitly rejected the federal Portal-to-Portal Act exclusion for California state-law claims.

Procedural posture: California Court of Appeal, Second Appellate District, decided Feb. 21, 2006. Overton distinguished Morillion on the "required vs. permitted" axis. 90% of employees used the shuttle; the 10% who did not demonstrated the option was real.

Procedural posture: California Supreme Court, decided July 26, 2018. The court answered a 9th Circuit certified question and held the federal de minimis doctrine inapplicable to California state-law wage claims for the unpaid time at issue (regularly recurring small increments of off-the-clock work).

The DLSE opinion-letter archive is publicly accessible at the California DIR site, but the research generalizes across multiple opinion letters without naming a single dispositive citation. The research body discloses this by describing the post-2018 line as a pattern rather than a single binding authority; the research is consistent with practitioner-side California employment-law treatises but no single DLSE letter is cited in the research piece. Suggestion: this is the most-honest framing for a multi-letter administrative trend and the partial status is acceptable as long as the research body's "DLSE opinion-letter line" language remains generalized.

Fact Sheet #22 is the publicly-published Wage and Hour Division guidance covering hours worked, including travel time. State-specific DOL/DIR/L&I guidance (CA DIR, NY DOL, WA L&I) has tightened in the same direction.

The state-by-state coverage in the research enumerates 9 states (CA, NY, WA, OR, CO, MA, IL, AK, NV) with explicit citations; the remaining 41 default to federal Portal-to-Portal. The federal-floor default is well-established across the wage-and-hour treatise literature; no state has affirmatively pre-empted federal Portal-to-Portal for state-law claims beyond the 9 enumerated.

Math reconciles: $900 + $180 = $1,080; $1,080 ÷ 42 = $25.7143/hr ≈ $25.71; 2 × 0.5 × $25.71 = $25.71; $1,080 + $25.71 = $1,105.71. The half-time premium method is correct because the straight-time pay already covers all 42 hours at the weighted-average regular rate.

Procedural posture: California Court of Appeal, Sixth Appellate District, decided Oct. 24, 2022. The California Supreme Court granted review on Feb. 1, 2023. Camp is persuasive-only authority during California Supreme Court review (S277518). The case is cross-referenced as the rounding-doctrine bridge to compensable drive time captured via GPS / dispatch-app / mobile clock-in.