Do You Have to Pay Employees for Drive Time Between Job Sites?
The short answer is yes. Once the workday starts, time spent driving from one job site to another is work time under federal law, and it counts toward overtime. The commute is a different story, and the shop stop changes everything. Here is how the rules actually work for a field crew, and how to capture the drive segments without a Friday argument.
JULY 13, 2026 · BY THE CLOX TEAM
If your crew hits two or three addresses a day, drive time is probably the biggest pay question you have never fully settled. The short answer is yes: under federal law, time an employee spends traveling from one job site to another during the workday is work time, and you have to pay for it. The longer answer is that the workday has edges, and where those edges sit decides whether a given drive is paid or not.
This guide walks through the federal rules in plain language, the shop stop that trips up most contractors, the overtime math, and the practical problem underneath all of it: actually capturing those drive segments so nobody is reconstructing Tuesday from memory.
Worth knowing
One caveat before anything else. This is general information about the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, not legal advice. States add their own rules on top, and California in particular goes further than federal law. Confirm anything that affects paychecks with your state labor agency or your attorney.
01
The three drives in a field crew's day
Every drive your crew makes falls into one of three buckets, and each bucket has its own rule.
The morning commute. Driving from home to the first job site, and from the last site back home, is ordinary commuting. Under the federal Portal-to-Portal Act, you do not have to pay for it, even if the first site changes every day and even if the drive is long. There are exceptions when a job site is far outside the normal working area, and some states treat this differently, but the baseline rule is that the commute is on the worker's time.
Drives between job sites. Once the workday has started, travel from one site to the next is work. The Department of Labor's regulations treat travel "as part of the employer's principal activity," such as job site to job site travel, as hours worked. If your electrician finishes a panel swap at the first address and drives 40 minutes to the second, those 40 minutes go on the timesheet at an hourly rate, and they count toward the overtime threshold.
The shop stop. Here is the one that catches people. If workers report to the shop or yard first, to load material, hitch a trailer, get the day's assignments, or pick up a company truck, the workday usually starts at the shop. The drive from the shop to the first site is then paid travel, because the first principal activity of the day already happened. The same logic runs in reverse: if the crew has to return the truck and unload at the yard, the day ends at the yard, and the drive back from the last site is paid.
This is often called the continuous workday rule. From the first principal activity to the last one, the clock is generally running, and the drives inside that window are work time.
02
Passenger or driver matters less than you think
Within the workday, it does not matter whether the worker is behind the wheel or riding shotgun. Between-site travel is paid either way. The driver-versus-passenger distinction mostly matters for travel outside regular hours, like an overnight trip to a job in another state, where the rules get more detailed. For a local crew running addresses inside one metro area, treat every seat in the truck the same.
03
Drive time counts toward overtime
Paid travel hours are regular hours for overtime purposes. A worker with 36 hours on site and 6 hours of between-site driving is a 42-hour worker, and 2 of those hours are overtime at time and a half. This is where unpaid drive time turns from a payroll shortfall into a compounding problem: the missing hours are often exactly the hours that would have crossed the 40 line.
You are allowed to pay a different, lower hourly rate for travel time as long as it clears the minimum wage and the arrangement is clear in advance, and the overtime rate then comes from a weighted average of the rates that week. We wrote up the mechanics and the math in Can You Pay a Different Rate for Travel Time?
04
Where states go further
Worth knowing
A few examples of the kind of thing state law adds, so you know what to check. California requires reimbursement of vehicle expenses when workers drive their own vehicles for work, and its definition of hours worked is broader than the federal one. Some states have reporting-time or show-up pay rules that interact with days cut short. None of this replaces the federal floor; it stacks on top. The check with your state agency is worth an afternoon once, so the policy is settled.
05
The real problem: capturing the segments
Most contractors do not underpay drive time because they decided to. They underpay it because the record never captured it. A paper timecard says 7:00 to 3:30. It does not say which 50 minutes of that were windshield time between the Hendricks job and the Alvarez job, so the hours either get guessed, rounded away, or argued about.
The fix is to make the record at the moment the work changes, on the device the worker already carries:
- The worker clocks in at the first work act of the day. At the shop if the day starts at the shop, at the first site if they drive straight there.
- When they leave a site for the next one, they switch the job tag on the punch. The drive lands under a travel task, or under the destination job, whichever way you cost it.
- At the last work act, they clock out. The day has edges, and every segment inside it has a label.
Clox is built around this. Crews clock in from their phones in one tap, every hour is tagged to a job and task, and the week adds itself up with the travel segments visible instead of buried. Location is captured only at clock-in, never in the background, so the crew is not being tracked down the highway; the record simply shows where the punch happened. On Friday you approve a week where site hours and drive hours are already separated, and the payroll export carries the split.
06
A policy you can copy
Three sentences settle most of the arguments before they start. Adapt to your state, put it in writing, and have everyone acknowledge it.
07
Settle it once
The rules are not the hard part. Federal law gives you a clear baseline: commute unpaid, between-site drives paid, shop stop starts the day. The hard part is a record that captures it without adding office work, and that is a one-time setup instead of a weekly argument.
Clox is free for 14 days with no credit card, and there is a 30-day money-back guarantee on your first paid subscription. The iPhone app is on TestFlight now, and anyone on your crew can also clock in from a phone browser at app.getclox.com. Start a free trial, set up your jobs and a travel task, and run one real week with the drive segments on the record.