New Labor Department Guidance Says Your Skipped Commute Is Not Paid Time

The US Department of Labor has said employers do not need to pay for an employee's ordinary midday travel between home and work, in one of two newly issued opinion letters addressing compensable working time, according to HR Dive and the department's own announcement. The guidance matters to any hybrid worker who has wondered whether starting the day at home and travelling in at lunchtime changes their pay. The short answer is that it does not, and that is mostly good news, because the ambiguity had been stopping employers from offering the flexibility at all. At Metaintro we track rulings like this because they quietly determine what working patterns your employer is willing to put on the table.

What exactly did the Department of Labor decide?

The first letter, FLSA2026-9, came in response to a question from an employer with a large nonexempt workforce. Those employees do not regularly travel as part of their job duties and can work from home when business needs permit. The employer had not been allowing staff to work in more than one location in a single workday, specifically because of concerns that the Fair Labor Standards Act would require paying them for a commute taken in the middle of the workday. In practice that meant employees were not permitted to work from home in the morning to avoid rush hour and then come into the office at lunchtime to finish the day on site.

The employer wanted to offer that flexibility, provided it did not create an additional pay obligation. The agency's answer was direct. Any time employees spend travelling between their home and their primary worksite within a workday may be excluded from recorded worktime, as long as that travel is otherwise a normal or ordinary commute that primarily benefits the employee. In other words, moving your commute to the middle of the day does not convert it into paid time.

The second letter, FLSA2026-10, addressed a different situation. An MRI engineer worked at client sites from 8am to 5pm, received service requests at home, and scheduled the day's client appointments before their shift began. The employee then drove an employer-provided vehicle to job sites, often making work-related phone calls during the drive. The agency concluded that the time spent receiving requests was not compensable, because it was incidental to the use of an employer-provided vehicle for commuting.

Wage and Hour Division Administrator Andrew Rogers said the letters offer comprehensive guidance that allows employers to confidently make informed decisions regarding a wider variety of employee work arrangements, and that by explaining how the FLSA applies to various commuting situations, the division is helping organisations implement compliant practices while ensuring workers are properly paid for all hours worked.

Does this mean employers can stop paying for all travel?

No, and this is the part most summaries of the ruling skip. The agency was explicit that employees may be due pay for travel time in circumstances that fall outside the ordinary and that primarily benefit the employer. The example the department itself gave is an employee who has gone home for the day and is then called back for an emergency. That is not a normal commute, it exists for the employer's benefit, and it is compensable.

The department also warned employers that this opinion should not be read as a departure from its longstanding position that travel from worksite to worksite during the workday is compensable. That distinction is the practical heart of the guidance. Home to office is a commute. Office to client site, or client site to client site, is work travel and must be paid. If your employer starts treating the new letters as blanket permission to stop paying for travel between locations, that is a misreading of the guidance rather than an application of it.

The test running through both letters is who primarily benefits. Travel that mainly serves your convenience, including choosing to dodge rush hour, sits on the unpaid side. Travel that mainly serves the employer's operational needs sits on the paid side. That principle is worth remembering, because it will resolve most everyday questions faster than trying to match your situation to a specific example.

Why did an employer ask for this ruling in the first place?

Because legal uncertainty was costing employees flexibility they wanted. This is the detail that makes the story more interesting than a technical pay ruling. The employer in FLSA2026-9 was not trying to avoid paying people. It was trying to offer split-location days and had blocked the arrangement because nobody could tell it whether the midday drive would trigger a pay obligation across a large nonexempt workforce. Faced with that ambiguity, the safe legal choice was to forbid the practice entirely.

That pattern repeats across employment law far more often than most workers realise. When the rules are unclear and the downside of guessing wrong is a wage-and-hour claim across thousands of employees, employers default to the restrictive option. The flexibility does not disappear because anyone objected to it. It disappears because no one wanted to be the test case. Our reporting on the quiet hybrid arrangements employees negotiate without formal policy shows how much working practice ends up living in that grey area.

Opinion letters exist to close exactly this kind of gap. They are official written interpretations from the department's enforcement agencies, including the Wage and Hour Division, responding to real-world questions from individuals or organisations about specific factual circumstances. The department relaunched the opinion letter programme in June 2025, and employer representatives have generally favoured it because the letters have the potential to serve as a defence in litigation. For employees, the same letters are useful in the opposite direction, because they set out in writing what the agency thinks the law requires.

What does this change for hybrid workers in practice?

For most people, it should expand rather than restrict what is available. The direct consequence of FLSA2026-9 is that an employer can now offer a morning at home followed by an afternoon in the office without worrying that the drive in the middle creates an unplanned payroll liability. If your workplace has previously refused split-location days, this guidance removes the stated reason. That is a concrete thing to raise, and it is far more persuasive than a general request for flexibility.

The framing matters when you ask. Rather than requesting to work from home more, ask specifically whether the organisation would consider staggered start locations now that the department has clarified the position on midday commute time. Referencing the letter by name signals that you are not asking the company to take a risk. Our guide to the commute-related perks workers should be asking their employer about covers how to build that conversation around cost and logistics rather than preference, which tends to land better with managers.

There is a real quality-of-life argument underneath the legal one. Avoiding a rush-hour commute twice a day is one of the largest returns available from any flexible working arrangement, in both time and money, and it does not require reducing hours or changing responsibilities. Our reporting on what workers give up when hybrid arrangements are designed badly found that the arrangements people resent most are usually the ones that mandate presence without regard to when travel is actually painful.

It is also worth understanding the limits of what an opinion letter is. It is an interpretation of how the law applies to a specific set of facts, not new legislation and not a court ruling. If your circumstances differ materially from the ones described, the conclusion may differ too. Employees who are unsure can contact the Wage and Hour Division directly through its helpline on 866-4US-WAGE, which is a free service and considerably faster than most alternatives.

Who does this affect most, and who does it not affect at all?

The guidance is aimed squarely at nonexempt employees, which is the group whose hours must be recorded and paid under the FLSA. If you are salaried and exempt, questions about whether a particular half hour counts as worktime largely do not arise for you, because your pay does not vary with recorded hours. That is why this ruling has landed quietly in a lot of offices. The people it helps most are hourly and shift-based staff, who are also the people least likely to have been offered split-location flexibility in the first place.

That is the genuinely interesting part. Hybrid working has been distributed unevenly, concentrated among salaried knowledge workers while hourly staff in the same buildings were told the arrangement was not possible. In at least some of those cases, the obstacle was this specific legal ambiguity rather than a judgement about the work. Removing it does not automatically deliver flexibility to nonexempt employees, but it takes away the most commonly cited reason for refusing. Our coverage of how return-to-office mandates land differently on different groups of workers shows how often blanket policies conceal these uneven effects.

Field-based workers are the other group with a direct stake, and FLSA2026-10 speaks to them. If you drive an employer-provided vehicle from home to a first client appointment and handle scheduling calls along the way, the department's view is that time incidental to using that vehicle for commuting is not compensable. Anyone in installation, maintenance, inspection or mobile healthcare work should read that letter closely rather than relying on a summary, because the outcome turned on the specific facts of how the day was structured. Our reporting on how flexible and mobile roles are being reshaped by employer policy covers the wider direction of travel.

What should you do if you think you are owed travel pay?

Start by working out which category your travel falls into, using the primary-benefit test rather than how the time feels. Write down the actual pattern for a normal fortnight. Note where each journey started and ended, whether it happened between two work locations, and whether you were performing work during it. Home to primary worksite is almost certainly unpaid. Worksite to worksite is compensable. Call-backs and emergencies outside your normal schedule are likely compensable. Most disputes resolve simply by categorising the journeys accurately.

If you conclude that worksite-to-worksite travel has not been paid, raise it in writing and reference the department's position that such travel remains compensable. Keep it factual and unemotional. Wage and hour errors at this level are very often genuine administrative mistakes rather than deliberate underpayment, particularly at employers running complex hybrid patterns, and a clear written summary is usually enough to get payroll corrected without any conflict.

Be aware that state law can be more protective than federal law, and where it is, the higher standard applies. Several states have their own rules on travel time and reporting time that go beyond the FLSA floor. The federal guidance sets the minimum, not the ceiling. The same caution applies internationally, where the position varies widely. Workers outside the United States should not assume this guidance describes their rights at all. Our reporting on how remote work disputes have been running through UK employment tribunals is a reminder that each jurisdiction handles these questions on its own terms.

Finally, keep a copy of any arrangement you agree. If your employer offers split-location days on the back of this guidance, get the pattern confirmed in writing, including which location counts as your primary worksite. That single detail determines which of your journeys are commutes and which are work travel, and it is the thing most likely to become contested later if your role or your reporting line changes.

People Also Asked

Q: Do employers have to pay for a midday commute between home and the office?

A: No. The Department of Labor concluded in opinion letter FLSA2026-9 that time spent travelling between home and a primary worksite within a workday may be excluded from recorded worktime, provided it is an otherwise normal or ordinary commute that primarily benefits the employee.

Q: When does travel time still have to be paid?

A: When it falls outside the ordinary and primarily benefits the employer. The department gave the example of an employee who has gone home for the day and is called back for an emergency. It also confirmed that travel from worksite to worksite during the workday remains compensable.

Q: What is a Department of Labor opinion letter?

A: It is an official written interpretation from one of the department's enforcement agencies, including the Wage and Hour Division, explaining how laws such as the FLSA apply to specific factual circumstances. The department relaunched its opinion letter programme in June 2025.

Related Articles

• Commute Perks Workers Should Ask Their Employer About
• The Hushed Hybrid Work Trend
• Hybrid Work as the Worst of All Worlds
• Fidelity Ends Hybrid Work in the RTO Wave
• Google's Remote and Hybrid Model
• Will AI Kill the Return to Office
• Chronic Illness and the Return to Office Struggle
• UK Remote Work Tribunal Cases
• Cash for Comfy Commutes
• New Federal Labor Rules on Tip Credits
• Busiest Commuter Train Shutdown and Worker Impact

Know your rights. Guidance like this quietly decides which working patterns your employer is willing to offer, and most people never hear about it until a policy changes around them. Metaintro tracks the roles and employers actually offering flexible and hybrid arrangements across the global market, so you can compare what is really on offer rather than what is advertised, and you can create your free account here to start matching today.