Employee commutes: New twists on an old question

Remote work, hybrid schedules and mobile field roles have made one of wage and hour law’s oldest questions newly relevant: when is a commute just a commute, and when does it become compensable work time?

The US Department of Labor (DOL) addressed that question in two recent opinion letters, which show that the compensability of commuting time under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) is not controlled by labels alone. Rather, it depends on what the employee is doing, who primarily benefits from the travel and whether work-related duties have changed an ordinary commute into part of the job.

In its first opinion letter, the DOL considered nonexempt employees who split a workday between home and the office. They worked at home, traveled between home and the office during the day, and then resumed working. The DOL concluded that their travel remained normal or ordinary commuting time when the mid-day commute was offered as a voluntary alternative to the unpaid commute that otherwise would have occurred before or after the workday.

That conclusion matters for hybrid work design. The DOL rejected the idea that once an employee begins working at home, any later home-to-office travel automatically becomes compensable under the “continuous workday” (a legal doctrine establishing that once the workday starts, all activity is ordinarily compensable until the workday ends). Instead, the DOL treated ordinary commuting as a noncompensable type of time that can occur during the workday, much like a meal break or rest break.

The second opinion letter shows the other side of the coin. It involves a field service engineer who received pages, called clients, scheduled appointments and drove from home to the first client site. The DOL concluded that merely receiving pages was not compensable because it was incidental to the use of an employer-provided vehicle for commuting. But calling clients and coordinating other engineers was compensable because those tasks were integral and indispensable to the engineer’s principal work of installing and servicing equipment at client locations.

The second letter is especially important for field-based and dispatch-driven roles. When an employee performs substantial work before or during their drive, the commute may lose its ordinary character. The commute is no longer simply the employee’s choice about where to live and how to get to work. It becomes part of a work sequence shaped by customer needs, assignment timing and employer control.

Recent court decisions show how fact-specific the analysis can be.

In Walters v. Pro. Lab. Grp., LLC, 120 F.4th 546 (7th Cir. 2024), the court considered employees who drove to a client’s remote site where they would remain for the duration of a project. Their employer argued they were engaged in normal, noncompensable commutes when they traveled to the client sites.

But the court disagreed. It ruled that the employees were not making an ordinary daily commute because the assignments required travel away from home overnight. That distinction is useful for HR because the same drive that looks like commuting in one setting may be paid travel in another when overnight work is involved.

By contrast, Villarino v. Pacesetter Pers. Serv., Inc., 161 F.4th 1270 (11th Cir. 2025) illustrates the continuing force of the ordinary commute rule. The court held that a temporary staffing company did not have to pay workers for travel from a labor hall to jobsites because it was an ordinary commute. The court emphasized that transportation was optional and provided for the employees’ benefit.

The takeaway is that commute time is not black or white, either always unpaid or always risky. A better approach is to consider three questions:

• Is the employee merely traveling between home and work? Or are they traveling as part of the job?
• Is the employee free from work during the travel, or performing required tasks?
• Are pre-commute or in-commute activities incidental, brief and administrative, or integral to the employee’s principal duties?

Those questions can help organizations evaluate hybrid schedules, field-service dispatch practices, take-home vehicle arrangements and remote-start workdays. They also can help identify when timekeeping systems need to capture work performed at home, work performed while traveling and travel that occurs after the workday has already begun.

The opinion letters do not eliminate gray areas. And it’s important to recognize that they provide a good-faith defense only when workplace facts exactly match the letters’ specific scenarios. They do, however, provide a practical framework for applying familiar FLSA principles to modern work patterns. Ordinary commuting can remain unpaid even when it occurs mid-day in a flexible hybrid schedule. But when the commute is wrapped around required customer calls, dispatch coordination or other principal job duties, the wage and hour analysis changes quickly.