The Department of Labor just answered a question a lot of employers have been wondering about: if an employee splits her day between home and office, who pays for the drive in between?
TL;DR: Splitting the workday between home and office doesn’t mean paying for the commute.
Start with what’s never been in dispute: the drive to the office in the morning and home at night has never been compensated. That’s true no matter how far away the employee lives, how bad the traffic is, or how many hours she works once she gets there. It’s an ordinary commute, and ordinary commutes have always been on the employee’s own time.
The harder question is what happens when that commute moves to the middle of the workday. A new Wage and Hour Division Opinion Letter works through three real scenarios.
One employee dodges rush hour by working from home in the morning, driving in around 10, working until 3:30, driving home before traffic hits again, and completing their work again from home. Another wants to knock out a volunteer project at home before her regular shift, instead of coming in early. A third rides the city bus, can’t finish before the last one leaves, and asks to take the rest of his work home instead of staying late.
In each case, the employee travels between home and office in the middle of the workday. Under the continuous workday rule, once an employee starts working for the day, “travel from job site to job site during the workday” is paid. For that reason, some employers have assumed that the mid-shift commutes described above are compensated.
They aren’t. The continuous workday rule does not come into play here, because, according to the DOL, it’s all still just a commute.
WHD draws a clean line: an “ordinary” home-to-work commute isn’t work whether it happens at 7 a.m., 6 p.m., or noon. It goes a step further, recognizing a mid-day commute as its own category of unpaid time during the workday, alongside bona fide meal breaks and off-duty time.
The test was never the clock. It’s who benefits. If the mid-day trip is the employee’s idea, taken to beat traffic, catch a bus, or carve out home time, it “primarily benefits the employee.” That makes it ordinary, even if it cuts her total drive time in half.
Two things haven’t changed, though.
1. Work is still work. The hours the employee actually spends working at home, finishing that volunteer project or wrapping up the day’s assignment, get paid in full. Only the drive itself is free.
2. Job-site-to-job-site travel still counts. A repair tech who drives from the office to a customer’s building and back is on the clock the whole time. This letter is about commuting home, not bouncing between worksites.
If you’re building a hybrid or split-shift option, make it genuinely optional, let employees pick their own timing, and keep timekeeping honest about hours actually worked away from the office. Do that, and the commute in between belongs to the employee. Not your payroll.
