Compensable Travel Time & DOL Opinion Letters

What employers should know about key developments this week:

DOL Opinion Letter FLSA2026-9: The U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL’s) Wage and Hour Division (WHD) evaluated several real-world scenarios—such as an employee working from home in the morning to avoid traffic before commuting in later—and concluded that voluntary midday travel between home and the office qualifies as “normal” or “ordinary” commuting, and need not be compensated, even where the employee performs work at both locations.
DOL Opinion Letter FLSA2026-10: In a second letter, the WHD distinguished between commute-related tasks that are merely incidental to travel and those that are integral to job duties. Specifically, the WHD found that time spent by the employee in question receiving pages or assignments was not compensable, while time spent calling clients or scheduling appointments was compensable.
Why These Letters Matter: Work increasingly happens in noncontinuous blocks across different locations, raising new questions about when travel time is compensable. While WHD opinion letters aren't binding on courts, they provide guidance for employers; the agency has issued 12 so far in 2026, with more expected.

In this episode of Employment Law This Week®, Epstein Becker Green attorneys Paul DeCamp and Eduardo J. Quiroga discuss the two opinion letters and their implications for compensable travel time.

Compensable Travel Time: What Two New DOL Opinion Letters Mean for Employers
Play
August 12, 2026

Transcript

[00:00:03] George Whipple: Welcome to Employment Law This Week. I’m George Whipple. When is travel time compensable? That’s what two opinion letters from the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division address. Evolving work environments have created uncertainty for employers in this area of the law. Epstein Becker Green’s Paul DeCamp tells us how things have changed.

[00:00:30] Paul DeCamp: When the Department of Labor began dealing with regulating and defining what constitutes compensable work, the common scenario would be that a person would perform all of his or her work activities at a single location, essentially in a single stretch of time, perhaps broken up by a meal or two or some breaks. Now what we're seeing is work being performed in non-continuous blocks during the day in some instances, sometimes in different locations, and sometimes spread out across the entire day. And that leads to new issues about what is and is not work at the margins.

[00:01:09] George Whipple: Some of these new issues are addressed in DOL opinion letters FLSA2026-9 and FLSA2026-10. The first answers a question about whether mid-day travel between an employee’s home and work office is compensable in a situation where the employee performs work at both locations. Epstein Becker Green’s Eduardo Quiroga has more.

[00:01:37] Eduardo Quiroga: The DOL was presented with three scenarios: One where a non-exempt employee works from home before coming in to work to avoid traffic. Another where an employee volunteers to work a special assignment and requests to perform the assignment from home before his regular commute into the office in order to avoid arriving early or staying late at the office; And another where an employee leaves work early to catch a bus and continues work at home. The Wage and Hour Division Administrator opined that in all three scenarios such mid-day travel would qualify as “normal” or “ordinary” commuter travel, which is not hours worked under the FLSA and its implementing regulations and, importantly, need not be compensated as time worked.

[00:02:25] George Whipple: Opinion letters have no binding force or any effect on the courts, but they act as guidance for employers on evolving work environments. FLSA2026-10 addresses a different issue, the question of whether travel time is compensable if the employee is working while commuting.

[00:02:47] Eduardo Quiroga: The Wage and Hour Division’s Administrator opined that, based on the information presented, time spent receiving pages or assignments would not be considered compensable hours worked as it is incidental to the employee’s use of an employer-provided vehicle for commuting. In contrast, time spent calling clients to schedule appointments and scheduling other field service engineers would be considered compensable hours worked as it is not incidental to the employee’s commute, but rather integral and indispensable to the employee’s principal work activities of installing and servicing equipment at client sites.

[00:03:24] George Whipple: Thanks, Eduardo and Paul. The current administration announced a relaunch of the opinion letter program in June 2025, and has issued a total of 12 opinion letters so far this year, with more expected in the remainder of 2026. Thank you for watching. We’ll see you next time.

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