When Hybrid Work Changes the Clock: New Federal Guidance on Travel Time

Employment & Workplace
Written By Seth Jewell

Hybrid schedules and mobile workforces create a deceptively simple payroll question: when does the workday actually begin?

For many nonexempt employees, an ordinary trip between home and work is not compensable. But the analysis can change when an employee works from home before traveling, makes substantive business calls on the way to a customer, receives assignments before a shift, or moves between job sites during the day.

On July 22, 2026, the U.S. Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division issued two opinion letters addressing those situations. The letters do not create new statutes or regulations. They apply existing federal wage-and-hour principles to specific facts. Even so, they give employers a useful reason to review hybrid-work, dispatch, timekeeping, and travel practices before small amounts of unrecorded time become a larger overtime problem.

Key takeaways

  • A voluntary commute between home and the office may remain unpaid even when it occurs between two periods of work on the same day.

  • Work performed at home does not automatically make every later trip compensable. The facts—including who controls the timing and whether the employee can use the interval for personal purposes—matter.

  • Substantive calls, scheduling, dispatch, or other principal duties before or during a trip can start the compensable workday and may cause later travel to count as hours worked.

  • A short electronic acknowledgment may be treated differently from meaningful work, but employers should not build payroll practices around assumptions that recurring tasks are too small to count.

  • Employers need a practical way for nonexempt employees to record unscheduled remote work and travel time accurately.

The starting rule: an ordinary commute is generally unpaid

The Portal-to-Portal Act generally excludes ordinary travel to and from the place where an employee performs the employee's principal work, subject to important qualifications. Department of Labor regulations likewise distinguish ordinary home-to-work travel from travel that is part of the day's work. Travel between job sites after the workday begins is generally compensable, and work that an employee is required to perform while traveling must be counted.

Those rules are easiest to apply when an employee starts and ends each day at the same workplace. They become harder when home is also a work location or when the employee reports directly to customers.

Voluntary mid-day commuting may remain unpaid

In Opinion Letter FLSA2026-9, the Department considered nonexempt employees who wanted to divide a workday between home and the office. The proposed arrangements allowed employees to work remotely before or after traveling so they could avoid traffic, meet personal scheduling needs, or complete additional work at home.

The Department concluded that the mid-day trip could remain an ordinary, noncompensable commute where the arrangement was voluntary, primarily benefited the employee, and involved no work during the trip. The fact that the employee performed work both before and after the trip did not, by itself, make the travel compensable.

That conclusion is helpful, but it is not a blanket rule that all mid-day travel is unpaid. An employer-mandated trip between work locations is different. So is a trip during which the employee must perform work. The letter also depends on the employee having a genuine choice about the flexible arrangement rather than simply being labeled a volunteer.

Substantive pre-shift work can change the result

Opinion Letter FLSA2026-10 involved a field service engineer who drove an employer-provided vehicle from home to customer sites. Before the regular shift, the employee received service requests and called customers and other engineers to schedule appointments.

On the facts presented, the Department treated the brief act of receiving pages as incidental and not compensable. It reached a different conclusion about the calls. Calling customers and coordinating engineers were integral to the employee's service work and therefore compensable. Under the scenarios addressed in the letter, performing that substantive work could start the workday and make ensuing travel compensable; if the work began after the drive started, the travel after that point could be compensable.

The practical distinction is not simply whether an employee touched a phone. Employers should ask what the employee actually did, why the task was required, how closely it related to the employee's principal duties, when it occurred, and whether it constrained the employee's ability to use the time personally.

Why small amounts of time matter

The Fair Labor Standards Act requires covered employers to pay nonexempt employees for all hours the employer knows or has reason to believe are being worked. That includes work performed away from the employer's premises. In Field Assistance Bulletin 2020-5, the Department explained that employers should exercise reasonable diligence to capture unscheduled remote work, such as by providing a reasonable reporting process and paying for reported time.

A policy prohibiting off-the-clock work is useful, but it does not authorize an employer to ignore work it knows is occurring. Nor should a company discourage employees from reporting time because a task took only a few minutes. Repeated customer calls, messages, system logins, dispatch reviews, or schedule changes can accumulate across a workweek and affect overtime.

A practical review for Arkansas and Tennessee employers

Businesses with hybrid, field, service, sales, maintenance, health-care, construction, or multi-location employees should consider a focused review:

  1. Identify affected employees. Start with nonexempt employees who work at home, travel directly to customers, use company vehicles, receive early assignments, or respond to messages outside scheduled hours.

  2. Map the actual day. Determine when the first substantive task occurs, what happens during travel, when the last task ends, and whether the employee travels between sites.

  3. Separate voluntary flexibility from business direction. Document when an employee may choose to split the day for personal convenience and when the company requires movement between locations.

  4. Create a workable time-reporting process. Employees should be able to record remote tasks and compensable travel without asking for special permission. Supervisors should correct missed entries rather than instructing employees to absorb the time.

  5. Clarify communication rules. State when nonexempt employees are expected to monitor, acknowledge, or respond to calls and messages. Avoid expectations that quietly create unrecorded pre-shift or after-hours work.

  6. Address driving safety. Do not require employees to read, type, schedule, or participate in distracting calls while driving. Direct employees to perform necessary work before departure or after safely parking, and account for the resulting work and travel time correctly.

  7. Recalculate overtime. Newly captured time can push an employee over forty hours in a workweek and may affect the regular-rate calculation.

  8. Check other obligations. State law, an employment agreement, a collective-bargaining agreement, or company policy may provide rights beyond the federal baseline. Review the rules applicable to the employee's work location and the particular arrangement.

Use the letters as guidance, not a shortcut

Opinion letters are fact-specific. A business should not assume it receives a safe harbor merely because its arrangement resembles one paragraph in a published letter. Small factual differences—such as whether a schedule is truly voluntary, whether a task is integral to the job, whether the employee performs work during the trip, or whether the company knew of unreported time—can change the analysis.

The better approach is to build a defensible process: define expectations, capture actual time, train supervisors, and review recurring exceptions. Flexible work can remain flexible without leaving the payroll record uncertain.

Jewell Law Group assists Arkansas and Tennessee businesses with wage-and-hour reviews, hybrid-work policies, employee handbooks, timekeeping practices, workforce agreements, and related employment-risk planning.

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This article provides general information and is not legal advice. Reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Laws, regulations, and agency guidance can change, and their application depends on the particular facts and jurisdiction. Businesses should consult qualified counsel about their specific circumstances. Do not send confidential or time-sensitive information before the firm confirms an engagement. See the Website Legal Notice.

Seth Jewell
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