Does Travel Time Count Toward Overtime? The Rule for Field Crews
If travel time is hours worked, it counts toward the 40-hour overtime threshold like any other hour. The commute does not count, but driving between job sites does. Here is the federal rule, a worked week where 6 hours of driving turns a 36-hour week into 42, and the cases that trip up field crews.
SEPTEMBER 18, 2026 · BY THE CLOX TEAM
01
The rule in the DOL's own words
The Department of Labor's Fact Sheet 22 (read September 8, 2026) states the rule in two sentences. First, the commute: "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." Second, travel inside the day: "Time spent by an employee in travel as part of their principal activity, such as travel from job site to job site during the workday, is work time and must be counted as hours worked."
The phrase that matters for overtime is "counted as hours worked." Overtime under the Fair Labor Standards Act is owed on hours worked over 40 in a workweek. There is no separate category for travel that sits outside the count. If it's the forty-first hour, it's overtime, whether the worker spent it on a roof or behind the wheel.
The fact sheet also answers the "we didn't ask them to" objection: "Work not requested but suffered or permitted to be performed is work time that must be paid for by the employer." If the foreman knows the crew drove from one job to the next at 1 p.m., that drive is work time even if nobody told them to log it. The pay side is in Do You Have to Pay Employees for Drive Time Between Job Sites?. This post is about what that paid time does to the overtime count.
02
A worked week: 36 hours on site plus 6 hours driving
Here is a foreman's normal week. He starts at the first site each morning and moves to a second site after lunch, and the drive between them takes an hour to an hour and a half.
The on-site hours alone are 36, which looks like a week with no overtime. Add the 6 driving hours and the week is 42, so 2 hours are overtime. At $26 an hour:
Paying only the on-site hours leaves this one worker $182.00 short in one week. The same thing happens with less driving. A crew at 38 hours on site with 2 hours of between-site driving reaches 40 by Friday's last stop, and any hour after that is paid at 1.5 times.
03
Which travel counts and which does not
The confusion usually comes from mixing four cases together.
The commute. Driving from home to the first job of the day, and from the last job back home, is not work time under the federal rule and does not count toward the 40.
The shop stop. When the crew meets at the shop to load material or get the day's assignments, the workday starts at the shop. The drive from home to the shop is still the commute. The drive from the shop to the first site is travel during the workday, and it counts. This is the case that goes missing most often, because the crew clocks in at the site and the time at the yard and on the road never gets recorded. We cover yard time in Off-the-Clock Work: Yard Time, Truck Loading, and Other Hours You Probably Owe.
Between sites. Site to site during the day is the clearest case in the fact sheet. It's work time, and it counts toward the 40.
Overnight trips. When a job takes the crew out of town, Fact Sheet 22 says: "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." Under that sentence, a crew that normally works 7 to 3:30 and rides to an out-of-town job from 8 to noon on a Sunday has 4 hours worked on Sunday. Read the fact sheet in full before you send a crew three states over.
04
A lower travel rate does not change the count
You can pay a different, lower rate for travel time if you meet the conditions, which we cover in Can You Pay a Different Rate for Travel Time?. The lower rate changes the dollars. Travel hours still count toward the 40.
Once a worker has two rates in a week, the overtime rate changes too. 29 CFR 778.115 (read September 8, 2026) sets the regular rate for a two-rate week at the weighted average. That is total straight-time earnings from both rates divided by total hours worked, and the overtime premium is then half that rate for each hour over 40. Take a week with 36 hours at $26 and 6 hours of travel at $18. Straight time is $936 + $108 = $1,044.00, and the regular rate is $1,044 ÷ 42 = $24.857. The 2 overtime hours carry a premium of 2 × $24.857 × 0.5 = $24.86, for $1,068.86 in all.
05
Daily overtime states
In a state with daily overtime the same logic applies to the daily threshold. California pays 1.5 times "for all hours worked in excess of eight hours up to and including 12 hours in any workday," per the state's overtime FAQ (read September 8, 2026). A worker with 7 hours on site and 1.5 hours of between-site driving has an 8.5-hour day and half an hour of daily overtime, even in a 34-hour week. The daily thresholds are in California overtime rules for trades.
Waiting time and rain delays are separate questions with their own rules, covered in Rain Delays, Show-Up Pay, and Waiting Time.
06
Pitfalls for field crews
- Clocking in at the site instead of at the shop. If the day starts at the yard, the clock starts at the yard. A punch at the first site loses the load time and the first drive.
- Clocking out for the drive and back in at the next site. This turns paid work time into an unpaid gap. The worker should stay on the clock and change the job.
- Treating drive time as a flat number. Paying 30 minutes a day regardless of the real drive is a guess. If the real drive was 50 minutes, 20 minutes of hours worked went uncounted.
- Planning the week from on-site hours. If four 9-hour site days plus an hour of driving each day is the plan, the crew is at 40 before Friday starts. Decide in advance whether that overtime is intended.
07
What this looks like in Clox
The clean way to record travel is to give it a job. Create a project named Travel, and when the crew leaves the first site the worker taps the project name on the clock screen and picks Travel. Clox closes the entry on the first job and opens a new one on Travel with the shift timer still running. At the second site the worker switches to that job the same way.
There is no clock-out and no gap, and the drive shows as its own entry on the timesheet. The mechanics are in the clocking in and out docs.
Overtime thresholds are set per employee, daily and weekly, with a multiplier that defaults to 1.5x, so the weekly 40 applies to every hour on the shift, including the Travel hours. The org-wide rule set is Standard (weekly) or California (daily overtime and double time). The settings are in the overtime and break rules docs. On the Reports page, the Regular and Overtime columns show the split, and filtering by project shows how many of the week's hours were Travel.
Clox reads location only at the moment of a punch. It does not track anyone between punches and has no live map, so a Travel entry records the time and nothing about the route.
08
FAQ
Does drive time count toward overtime?
If the crew meets at the shop first, when does the clock start?
Can I pay travel at a lower rate so it costs less in overtime?
Does travel time count toward daily overtime in California?
Your state may add rules on top of the federal ones, and an employment attorney or a payroll professional can check your travel policy against them. This is general information, not legal advice.
Clox is free for 14 days, no credit card required, and the first paid subscription comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Start a free trial, add a Travel project, and see what one real week of driving does to your overtime column.