Non-exempt Time for Travel
Paula_AZ
32 Posts
I have a non-exempt employee who will be visiting our corporate office in another state for a couple days. Is any part of the travel time (travel to the airport, flight time, travel to the hotel, etc.) considered worked time?
Comments
Take a look at 29CFR785.39:
Travel that keeps an employee away from home overnight is travel away from home. Travel away from home is clearly worktime when it cuts across the employee's workday. The employee is simply substituting travel for other duties. The time is not only hours worked on regular working days during normal working hours but also during the corresponding hours on nonworking days. Thus, if an employee regularly works from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. from Monday through Friday the travel time during these hours is worktime on Saturday and Sunday as well as on the other days. Regular meal period time is not counted. As an enforcement policy the Divisions will not consider as worktime that time spent in travel away from home outside of regular working hours as a passenger on an airplane, train, boat, bus, or automobile.
Of course, your state wage and hour law may take a different position (as it does here in California).
If the employee travels to another state to visit family rather than return the next day to work, that to me compensable if it occurs during the regular hours of work schedule, even on a day off. The reg doens't appear to speak to the specific issue though but since the employee went there for company business and has to return somewhere, then it seems to me the travel to the designated place of return if it occurs during the work hours schedule meets the criteria set in the partiuclar regulation (but the amount of time should not exceed the time it would have taken to fly back to the home community -- sound familiar?). But you should probably need to check with legal counsel. The travel the next day from the designated palce of retun back to the home community during the regular work hours schedule would not be work time it seems to me.
But from what you describe since the emplyee is traveling outside fo the regular schedule hours then under the FLSA provision that would not be compensable as work time in any case (except where state wage and hour law would hold differently).
Just my opinion.