Is Drive Time Paid Time? FLSA Travel Rules for Field Technicians

It's 7:10 on a Monday. Your lead HVAC tech has been on the phone in his driveway since 6:45, calling the three customers on today's list and sorting out who needs him first. At 7:15 he pulls out in the company van. His timesheet says he started at 8:00, when he walked into the first house. So is drive time paid for those 45 minutes on the road, and what about the half hour on the phone before it?

Under federal law, the answer depends less on the miles and more on what happened before he turned the key. This guide walks through the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) rules in plain English: the default commute rule, travel between jobs, the July 2026 Department of Labor opinion letter that speaks directly to field techs, take-home trucks, emergency callouts, and the records you'll want if anyone ever asks.

One note before we start. This is general information, not legal advice. Wage rules turn on the facts, and states can add their own. Check your situation with an employment lawyer or your state labor agency.

The default rule: an ordinary commute isn't paid

Start with the baseline. The federal regulation on home-to-work travel, 29 CFR 785.35, says a worker who leaves home before the workday and goes home after it is doing ordinary commuting, which is not work time. It also says this holds whether the person works at a fixed location or at different job sites every day.

Your plumber doesn't get paid for the drive to the first house because that house changes every morning. The Department of Labor's Fact Sheet #22 on hours worked puts it the same way: ordinary home-to-work travel isn't work time.

This rule comes from the Portal-to-Portal Act, codified at 29 U.S.C. 254, which carved commuting and other "preliminary" or "postliminary" activity out of paid time. The key word in all of it is "ordinary." Most of the hard questions are about when a commute stops being ordinary.

Is drive time paid between jobs? Yes

Once the workday has started, the picture flips. Fact Sheet #22 says travel from job site to job site during the workday is work time and has to be counted as hours worked. The regulation behind it, 29 CFR 785.38, adds a detail that catches a lot of shops: if techs must report to the shop or a meeting place to get instructions, load parts or pick up tools, the drive from there to the first job is work time too.

So for a typical electrical crew, these drives count:

• Shop to the first job, if the tech had to stop at the shop first for the day's assignments or materials.
• Job to job, all day.
• Job to the supply house and back, mid-shift.
• The last job back to the shop, if the tech is required to return the van or drop paperwork there.

The drive home from the last job, when the tech is free to go home, usually doesn't. Illustrative example: a tech who drives 25 minutes between each of five calls has roughly 1 hour 40 minutes of paid drive time that day, before you count any time at the shop. If your timesheets only capture "on site" time, that's the gap where overtime problems start.

This is also where people mix up two different questions. Paying your tech for drive time is a wage question. Charging your customer for the trip is a pricing question, and we cover that separately in how to charge for travel time. The answers don't have to match. You can bill a flat trip fee and still owe the tech hourly pay for every minute between calls.

When the first drive of the day becomes work

Here's the scenario from the top of this post, and it's the one the Department of Labor addressed on July 22, 2026 in opinion letter FLSA2026-10.

The facts: a field service engineer with no office to report to receives a batch of service requests by page each morning, then spends the hour before leaving calling customers to set appointment times and sometimes coordinating other engineers. The employer provides the vehicle. The question was whether the drive to the first appointment is paid.

The DOL's answer, in plain terms:

• The scheduling calls are work. Calling customers to set appointments is part of the job itself, so that time is paid.
• Once that work starts, the workday has started. The letter says the engineer's workday begins when the client calls begin. The drive that follows sits inside the workday, so it's compensable. The DOL called it "not, in fact, an 'ordinary' commute."
• Receiving pages, on its own, isn't work. Getting the day's assignments pushed to a pager or phone is treated as incidental to using the company vehicle.
• If the routine is different, the answer can be different. If the work at home isn't required right before the drive, say a tech knocks out paperwork whenever it suits him over a long window, the drive may still be an ordinary commute. The letter says it depends on all the circumstances.

A companion letter issued the same day, FLSA2026-9, looked at office staff who choose to work at home in the morning and travel to the office mid-day. The DOL said that voluntary mid-day trip is an ordinary commute and isn't hours worked, as long as the travel mainly benefits the employee and they're not working during it. Read the two together and you get a useful line for owners: if you require work right before the drive, the drive is likely paid. If the employee chooses the split for their own convenience, it likely isn't.

For your shop, the practical question is what you ask techs to do before they leave the house. Reading the day's job list probably isn't the issue. Calling customers, confirming arrival windows, or coordinating with another tech probably is.

Take-home trucks

Take-home vans are everywhere in HVAC and plumbing, and owners often assume the truck changes the commute rule. It mostly doesn't, thanks to the Employee Commuting Flexibility Act amendment to the Portal-to-Portal Act.

Under 29 U.S.C. 254(a), driving the employer's vehicle to and from work, and activity incidental to using it for commuting, isn't treated as principal work when two conditions are met:

1. The driving is within the normal commuting area for your business.
2. The vehicle use is covered by an agreement between you and the employee (or their representative).

Two practical takeaways. First, put the take-home truck arrangement in writing, including what the normal commuting area is. Second, the vehicle doesn't protect you if real work happens before the drive. In the 2026 letter, the engineer also had a company vehicle, and the drive was still paid because the scheduling calls started the workday first.

If a tech's first job is two hours outside your normal area, treat that trip as a separate question and get advice. "Normal commuting area" is a real limit, not a formality.

On-call and emergency callouts

The regulation on emergencies, 29 CFR 785.36, covers the classic after-hours call. A tech who has finished the day and gone home gets called out to travel a substantial distance for an urgent customer job. The regulation says all time spent on that travel is working time.

So the 11 p.m. no-heat call or the burst pipe on a Sunday generally counts from the time the tech leaves home, not from the time they knock on the door. The regulation doesn't settle every variation, such as a short hop for a callout or the drive back afterward, so set a clear written rule and apply it consistently.

Being on call is a separate question from the callout drive. Fact Sheet #22 says an employee on call at home, free to use the time for their own purposes, generally isn't working, though heavy restrictions can change that. If you run a rotation, our guide to on-call rotation for service technicians covers how to structure it fairly.

Some states are stricter

Everything above is federal. Some states have their own wage-and-hour rules on travel time, employer-required transport and on-call pay, and where a state rule gives the worker more, the stricter rule applies. If you run crews in more than one state, check each state's labor agency before you copy one policy across all of them.

A records checklist for drive time

Most drive-time disputes are really record-keeping disputes. If you can show when the workday started and what the tech was doing, the legal question gets much easier. Keep these:

• Status times for every job. When the tech accepted, went en route, started and completed. That's your job-to-job travel record.
• First work activity of the day. If techs make customer calls or coordinate jobs before leaving home, record when that starts. Under the 2026 letter, that time can mark the start of the paid day.
• Mileage by trip type. Business trips between jobs logged separately from commute and personal driving.
• A written commute and take-home vehicle policy. What counts as the normal commuting area, what techs are and aren't expected to do before leaving, and how callouts are paid.
• Callout records. Time the call came in, time the tech left, time they arrived.
• Consistent overtime math. Paid drive time counts toward the 40-hour overtime threshold. Hours a timesheet misses are hours your overtime math misses too.

Good records also cut the other way. If you're worried about padded hours, tight status and mileage records are the fair fix, not guesswork. We cover that side in time theft and buddy punching in field service.

Where FSM Navigator fits

FSM Navigator doesn't decide what's compensable. That's your call, made with your lawyer. What it does is give you the records to make the call.

Every tech gets one-tap status in the mobile app: accepted, en route, in progress, complete. Each update shows on the dispatch board, so your job-to-job drive times exist without anyone writing them down. On Pro, timesheets build hours, overtime and punctuality from the statuses techs set, and export to CSV for whoever runs your payroll. FSM Navigator doesn't run payroll itself.

On Pro, mileage tracking logs every drive to a job automatically, and trips can be marked business, commute or personal. That split lines up with the distinction this whole post is about.

Drive time is only as defensible as the hours behind it. Next, read Digital Timesheets for Field Service Technicians to see how shops are replacing paper time cards with records that hold up.