DOL addresses remote work’s impact on FLSA compensable travel time

The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) recently tackled the thorny and misunderstood issue of travel time. Specifically, it issued a new opinion letter addressing whether you must pay employees for travel time on days when they spend part of the day working from home and the other half in the office. The agency’s conclusion: Payment for the travel time isn’t warranted.

What opinion letter says

In my view, the DOL’s opinion letter takes the correct position: Provided an employee may use the time between working from home and then switching to the office “effectively for her own purposes,” you aren’t compelled to pay for the travel time. The letter notes:

When [an] employee arranges for her workday to be divided into a block worked at home and a block worked at the office, separated by a block reserved for the employee to use for her own purposes, the reserved time is not compensable, even if the employee uses some of that time to travel between home and the office.

Scenario no. 1. The opinion letter addressed two hypothetical situations. In the first scenario, the worker departed the office in the afternoon to attend a parent-teacher conference. After one hour of travel to and from the school, he went home and resumed work.

The letter found the stint between leaving the office and clocking back in from home wasn’t working time because the employee could do “as she pleases” with the time. Therefore, no travel pay could be awarded.