Whether travel time is paid work time or not depends on several factors, including whether the employee is performing any work on the trip, and where the travel originates. We will use the example of Beth, a bank teller, to illustrate the differences in work time and non-work time. Home To Work Travel: An employee who travels from home before the regular workday and returns to his/her home at the end of the workday is engaged in ordinary home to work travel, which is not work time. Commutes are not considered work time for which workers are entitled to pay. When an employee uses a company vehicle to travel from home to work (or engages in activities incidental to the use of the vehicle such as filling the vehicle with gas), the travel time will not be work time if 1) the travel is within the normal commuting area for the employer's business and 2) there is an agreement between the employer and the employee excluding such duties from paid work. Example: Beth commutes from her suburb to downtown every day, which takes her 45 minutes. She does no work on the trip. This time is not paid time. If she uses a company car, and fills the car with gas during some of her trips, her commute is still not considered work time, as long as there is an agreement with her employer that this is not considered paid work. Home to Work on a Special One Day Assignment in Another City: An employee who regularly works at a fixed location in one city is given a special one day assignment in another city and returns home the same day. The time spent in traveling to and returning from the other city is work time, except that the employer may deduct/not count that time the employee would normally spend commuting to the regular work site. Example: Beth is asked to spend the day in a work-related training session at a bank ninety minutes away from her home in the suburbs, 45 minutes more each way than she normally spends commuting to work. Of the three hours she spends commuting that day, ninety minutes is paid time, while the other ninety minutes is not paid time, since it can be deducted as the time she would normally spend commuting on a work day. Travel That is All in the Day's Work: Time spent by an employee in travel as part of his/her principal activity, such as travel from job site to job site during the workday, is work time and must be counted as hours worked. Example: After Beth arrives at her main branch office in the morning, she is asked to work at two other local branches to cover lunch breaks and an employee on vacation. The 15 minutes she spends traveling from one branch office to the next to perform work is work time for which Beth must be paid. Travel Away from Home Community: Travel that keeps an employee away from home overnight is travel away from home. Travel away from home is clearly work time when it cuts across the employee's workday. The time is not only hours worked on regular working days during normal working hours but also during corresponding hours on nonworking days. As an enforcement policy the Department of Labor will not consider as work time that time spent in travel away from home outside of regular working hours as a passenger on an airplane, train, boat, bus, or automobile. Example: Beth is required to attend a two-day training session in another city. Her normal workday is 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. She is required to leave at 3:00 p.m. and travel with other employees by car for four hours to reach the training session. On that day, she would be paid for two hours of work time (3:00 to 5:00 p.m.). If her employer chooses not to pay her for the other two hours spent riding as a passenger, it is a technical violation of the law, but not something that the Department of Labor will file a lawsuit against her employer to recover. If Beth drives the vehicle, instead of riding as a passenger, then her time is considered work time, unless she chose to drive instead of taking public transportation. In that case, her employer can choose to pay her for the time she spent driving, or the time she would have spent on public transportation, whichever is less.