FLSA2026-10 — Whether time spent by an employee receiving pages, calling clients and other workers to schedule appointments, and driving from home to the first client appointment is worktime that an employer must record and pay for under the FLSA.

U.S. Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division
Washington, DC 20210
FLSA2026-10
July 22, 2026
Dear Name*:
This letter responds to your request to the Wage and Hour Division (WHD or Division) for an
opinion regarding whether the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA or Act) requires payment for the
time that you, a field service engineer, spend receiving pages, calling clients and other engineers
to schedule appointments, and driving from home to the first client appointment—either while
performing these tasks or after completing them.
Based on the information presented, time spent receiving pages is not compensable hours worked
as it is incidental to your use of an employer-provided vehicle for commuting. In contrast, time
spent calling clients to schedule appointments and scheduling other field service engineers is
compensable hours worked as it is not incidental to your commute, but rather integral and
indispensable to your principal work activities of installing and servicing equipment at client sites.
Furthermore, under certain circumstances outlined below, where you are required to be engaged
in calling clients for an hour before or during your commute, we would not consider such travel to
be either an “ordinary” commute or otherwise not compensable under the Portal-to-Portal Act.
Accordingly, such travel would be compensable hours worked.
BACKGROUND
In your correspondence and follow-up communications with my staff, you represent that you are
employed as a field service engineer and are responsible for the installation and servicing of
magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) systems. You do not have an office to which you report.
Rather, you perform these services at clients’ locations—hospitals or imaging sites. Each day, you
drive from home to your first client appointment, from job site to job site, and then home after
your last appointment.
Your regular paid shift begins at 8:00 a.m. and ends at 5:00 p.m., and your first appointment can
be as early as 8:00 a.m. Between 7:00 a.m. and 8:00 a.m., your employer sends clients’ service
requests to you via your employer’s internal paging/messaging system. You receive about three
to five pages on average each morning, throughout the 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. hour. It takes you
approximately 15 seconds to accept a page. At some point after accepting each page, ideally as
soon as it comes in and generally within 15 minutes, you call each client to set up their
appointments. Each call may take 5 to 10 minutes, and in response to a call, you may need to
schedule other field service engineers if you are not able to cover the service request or if you need
assistance with a service request. You do not know in advance how many pages you will receive
per day or how long each call will take.
The vehicle you drive is provided by your employer and is a sports utility vehicle customarily used
for commuting. You do not incur out-of-pocket costs for driving, fueling, parking, or otherwise
maintaining the vehicle for commuting.

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You describe two scenarios:
 Scenario 1: You leave home at 8:00 a.m. and all of your drive time from home to your first
appointment occurs during your paid shift. You receive all pages and contact all clients to
schedule appointments before you leave home and drive to the first client location. During
this time, either between or during calls, you also engage in some personal or preliminary
activities, including drinking coffee, getting ready for the day, and collecting the tools or
supplies you will need for the day. Your employer does not pay for the time you spend at
home between 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. receiving pages and calling clients to schedule
appointments, including scheduling other field service engineers as necessary.
 Scenario 2: You need to leave home before 8:00 a.m. to get to the first client appointment.
At least some, and potentially all, of the time spent driving from home to your first
appointment occurs outside your paid shift. You still receive pages and call clients to
schedule their appointments between 7:00 a.m. and 8:00 a.m., but you perform these tasks
either in whole or in part in the vehicle while on the way to the first appointment. Your
employer does not pay for the first hour of your pre-shift drive time, but pays for any such
drive time after the first hour. For example, your first appointment may be at 8:30 a.m. at
a location that is a 2½ hour drive from your home, meaning you would leave home at 6:00
a.m. In such a scenario, your employer does not pay you for the time from 6:00 a.m. to
7:00 a.m., but pays you for the pre-shift drive time from 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m., in addition
to the 30-minute portion of the drive time that occurs during your paid shift.
Finally, you ask whether, under the FLSA, your employer must pay for the time you spend
receiving pages, calling clients to schedule their appointments, and scheduling other field service
engineers, and for the first hour of your drive time when such drive time occurs outside of your
shift.
GENERAL LEGAL PRINCIPLES
A. The FLSA’s Basic Requirements
The FLSA generally requires covered employers to pay employees at least the federal minimum
wage for all hours worked and overtime of at least one and one-half times the employee’s regular
rate of pay for all hours worked over 40 in a workweek. 29 U.S.C. §§ 206, 207(a). The amount
of wages an employee is entitled to receive in any workweek cannot be determined without
knowing the number of hours worked. See 29 C.F.R. § 785.1.
The Act broadly defines the term “employ” to include “to suffer or permit to work.” 29 U.S.C.
§ 203(g). The words “suffer” and “permit” overlap in meaning, but together in this definition they
encompass a broad spectrum of an employer’s actions or inactions regarding its employees’
work—ranging from an employer expressly requiring, to authorizing, to allowing, to tacitly
accepting or benefitting from, and even to refraining from, interfering with, preventing, or
stopping, work by its employees. Thus, as long as an employer knows or has reason to believe
that its work is being performed, the time spent performing such work is “hours worked” for FLSA
purposes, even if the work is not expressly assigned, requested, or required. 29 C.F.R. § 785.11;
see, e.g., Craig v. Bridges Bros. Trucking LLC, 823 F.3d 382, 388 (6th Cir. 2016); WHD Field

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Assistance Bulletin No. 2020-5 (Aug. 24, 2020) (“Employers’ obligation to exercise reasonable
diligence in tracking teleworking employees’ hours of work”).
In contrast, and perhaps surprisingly, the FLSA does not define what constitutes “work.” IBP, Inc.
v. Alvarez, 546 U.S. 21, 25 (2005). Because of the lack of a definition for this foundational term,
both the courts and the Wage and Hour Division were tasked with interpreting it, particularly over
the Act’s first decade. See WHD Op. Ltr. FLSA2026-9 (July 22, 2026). Ultimately, the Supreme
Court made clear that determining whether employee time constitutes “work” generally turns on
“[w]hether [it] is spent predominantly for the employer’s benefit or for the
employee’s . . . [according to] all the circumstances of the case.” Armour & Co. v. Wantock, 323
U.S. 126, 133 (1944). This remains the standard today. See WHD Op. Ltr. FLSA2026-9 at 3
(citing cases); WHD Op. Ltr. FLSA2020-19 at 2 (Dec. 31, 2020) (“Whether an employee is
‘working’ typically can be answered by determining whether her action is primarily for the benefit
of the employer.”); see also, e.g., Reich v. S. New England Telecomms. Corp., 121 F.3d 58, 65 (2d
Cir. 1997) (holding that time is compensable when employees “perform duties predominantly for
the benefit of the employer”). An employer must pay for all work that it knows or has reason to
know is being performed, including work performed off-site (e.g., at the employee’s home). See,
e.g., Von Friewalde v. Boeing Aerospace Operations, Inc., 339 F. App’x 448, 455 (5th Cir. 2009)
(citing Newton v. City of Henderson, 47 F.3d 746, 748 (5th Cir. 1995)); Holzapfel v. Town of
Newburgh, N.Y., 145 F.3d 516, 524 (2d Cir. 1998); 29 C.F.R. §§ 785.11–.12; WHD Op. Ltr.
FLSA2009-15 (January 15, 2009); WHD Op. Ltr. FLSA-112 (Aug. 11, 1993); WHD Op. Ltr., 1985
WL 1087351, at *2 (Dec. 30, 1985).
B. The Continuous Workday
The “continuous workday” doctrine establishes that “once the workday starts, all activity is
ordinarily compensable until the workday ends,” Aguilar v. Management & Training Corp., 948
F.3d 1270, 1279 (10th Cir. 2010) (cleaned up), even if an employee is not engaged in productive
work. See Sandifer v. U.S. Steel Corp., 571 U.S. 220, 226 (2014); Alvarez, 546 U.S. at 37. It
reflects a general presumption that an employer principally benefits from an employee’s time
during the workday and, conversely, the employee predominantly benefits from time outside it.
WHD Op. Ltr. FLSA2026-9. The doctrine, therefore, both serves and protects both employers and
employees. Time during the workday is ordinarily compensable; time away from work outside
the workday generally is not compensable. In effect, this approach prevents employers from
restricting the application of the FLSA only to time the employer determines is spent in active,
productive, or efficient work—a result that would frustrate the purpose of FLSA’s hourly
minimum wage and overtime requirements. Id. Similarly, the doctrine also means that every
second outside of the workday that arguably benefits the employer is not necessarily compensable
hours worked.
1
Altogether, the continuous workday doctrine is a pragmatic compromise anchored
in reality. Without it would come—both at the worksite and while working offsite (e.g., at

1
See, e.g., 29 C.F.R. § 785.17 (“An [on-call] employee who is not required to remain on the employer’s
premises but is merely required to leave word at his home or with company officials where he may be
reached is not working while on call.”); WHD Op. Ltr. FLSA-1271 (June 1, 1994) (advising that time spent
by law enforcement officers in physical fitness training during off-duty hours, where the training was
voluntary and not directly related to the employees’ jobs, was not compensable work even though “such
training benefits the employer”).

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home)—levels of monitoring, supervision, assessments, recordkeeping, abuse, disputes, and
litigation on an unprecedented scale in most workplaces—all to the dissatisfaction of, and
detriment to, both employees and employers. Id.
Of course, the Division has long recognized certain specific exceptions to the continuous workday
doctrine for time spent, on the one hand, at a worksite during the workday that clearly benefits the
employee more than the employer and, on the other hand, time away from a worksite outside the
workday that benefits the employer more than an employee. Id. The former is not compensable.
See 29 C.F.R. §§ 785.16 (off-duty time), 785.19 (bona fide meal breaks). The latter is. See 29
C.F.R. § 785.12 (work performed away from the worksite, even at home).
As the Division now clarifies, an ordinary home-to-work or work-to-home commute that takes
place during the workday constitutes a third exception to compensability during the continuous
workday. See WHD Op. Ltr. FLSA2026-9. An ordinary commute from home to work or from
work to home is not considered work under the FLSA, whether the employee works at a fixed
location or at different job sites. See Kuebel v. Black & Decker Inc., 643 F.3d 352, 360 (2d Cir.
2011); WHD Op. Ltr. FLSA2026-9; 29 C.F.R. § 785.35.
2
This is the case whether the commute
occurs before or after the workday, as is the typical case, or within the workday, as is the case for
an employee who chooses to work part of the day in the office and part of the day from home. See
WHD Op. Ltr. FLSA2026-9.
C. The Portal-to-Portal Act
In a series of cases between 1944 and 1946, the Supreme Court held that the FLSA required
employers to compensate employees for “all time during which an employee is necessarily
required to be on the employer’s premises, on duty or at a prescribed workplace,” including time
spent walking or riding on an employer’s premises, as well as certain preparatory and concluding
activities that the Court had determined were primarily for the employer’s benefit and thus
constituted work. Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co., 328 U.S. 680, 690–92 (1946); see Jewell
Ridge Coal Corp. v. Local No. 6167, United Mine Workers of Am., 325 U.S. 161, 170 (1945);
Tennessee Coal, Iron & R. Co. v. Muscoda Local No. 123, 321 U.S. 590, 598 (1944).
Facing a deluge of litigation in the aftermath of these cases, industry leaders did what any entity
or individuals seeking changes in statutory law must do: appeal to Congress. And Congress
responded, enacting the Portal-to-Portal Act (“Portal Act”), Pub. L. 80-49, 61 Stat. 84 (May 14,
1947), which amended the FLSA. Among other revisions, Congress set forth a more practical test
for determining whether hours at the beginning and end of the workday are compensable,
clarifying that employers were not required to compensate employees for time spent:
(1) walking, riding, or traveling to and from the actual place of performance of the
principal activity or activities which [an] employee is employed to perform, and

2
Accord Tennessee Coal, Iron & R. Co. v. Muscoda Local No. 123, 321 U.S. 590, 599 & n.12 (1944) (citing
Walling v. Peavy-Wilson Lumber Co., 49 F. Supp. 846 (W.D. La. 1943); Sirmon v. Cron & Gracey Drilling
Corp., 44 F. Supp. 29 (W.D. La. 1942); Bulot v. Freeport Sulphur Co., 45 F. Supp. 380 (E.D. La. 1942);
Dollar v. Caddo River Lumber Co., 43 F. Supp. 822 (W.D. Ark. 1941)).

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(2) activities which are preliminary to or postliminary to said principal activity or
activities,
which occur either prior to the time on any particular workday at which such
employee commences, or subsequent to the time on any particular workday at
which he ceases, such principal activity or activities.

61 Stat. at 86–87; 29 U.S.C. § 254(a). By its terms, the Portal Act applies to the enumerated
activities only if they occur before or after an employee’s workday, and specifically, before the
employee commences, or after the employee ceases, the employee’s “principal activity or
activities.” Thus, the Portal Act “does not affect the computation of hours worked within the
‘workday’ proper ... and its provisions have nothing to do with the compensability under the
[FLSA] of any activities engaged in by an employee during that period.” 29 C.F.R. § 790.6(a).
As both the Supreme Court and the Division have noted, an employee’s principal activities include
all activities that are “integral and indispensable to the principal activities that an employee is
employed to perform,” meaning they are an “intrinsic element of those activities . . . with which
the employee cannot dispense if he is to perform his principal activities.” Integrity Staffing Sols.,
Inc. v. Busk, 574 U.S. 27, 33 (2014); see also WHD Op. Ltr. FLSA2026-8 at 3 (May 28, 2026).
D. The Employee Commuting Flexibility Act
In 1996, Congress enacted the Employee Commuting Flexibility Act (ECFA), which amended the
Portal Act to provide that the use of an employer-provided vehicle for travel before or after the
workday, and activities incidental to the use of that vehicle for commuting, are not considered
“principal activities” under the FLSA as amended by the Portal Act. Pub. L. 104-188, § 2102, 110
Stat. 1755, 1928 (1996). In relevant part, the ECFA states:
For purposes of [the above-quoted provision of the Portal Act], the use of an
employer’s vehicle for travel by an employee and activities performed by an
employee which are incidental to the use of such vehicle for commuting shall not
be considered part of the employee’s principal activities if the use of such vehicle
for travel is within the normal commuting area for the employer’s business or
establishment and the use of the employer’s vehicle is subject to an agreement on
the part of the employer and the employee or representative of such employee.
29 U.S.C. § 254(a).
Thus, under the Act, time an employee spends in ordinary commuting from home to work and vice
versa in a vehicle provided by the employer is not compensable hours worked simply because the
employer—not the employee—owns the vehicle. Put simply, the employer’s ownership of the
vehicle used by the employee does not affect the analysis of hours worked under the Act.
Additionally, ECFA provides that activities incidental to the use of an employer-owned vehicle
under certain circumstances are not compensable hours worked if performed before or after the
employee’s workday.
3

3
Activities excluded from hours worked by virtue of the Portal Act, which includes ECFA, become hours
worked if compensated via contract, custom, or practice. See 29 U.S.C. § 254(b). In contrast, ordinary

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E. Compensable Travel Time
Unlike ordinary commuting time or travel time excepted by the Portal Act or ECFA, any travel
that is part of an employee’s principal activity, such as travel between different worksites during
the workday, is considered part of the day’s work and therefore compensable hours worked.
United Transp. Union Local 1745 v. City of Albuquerque, 178 F.3d 1109, 1119 (10th Cir. 1999);
29 C.F.R. § 785.38. Additionally, because an employee must be paid for all hours worked, courts
and the Division have long recognized that time spent during an otherwise non-compensable
ordinary home-to-work or work-to-home commute becomes compensable hours worked when the
employee is working during the commute time. See WHD Op. Ltr. FLSA2026-9; Reich v. N.Y.C.
Transit Auth., 45 F.3d 646, 651 (2d Cir. 1995) (explaining that the Portal Act does not excuse
employers from “payment for actual work required to be done during such travel”); accord Burton
v. Hillsborough Cnty., Fla., 181 F. App’x 829, 835 (11th Cir. 2006) (interpreting the ECFA and
concluding that just as non-compensable travel time does not become compensable merely because
the employee uses the employer’s vehicle, “otherwise compensable travel time does not become
non-compensable simply through the use of an employer-owned vehicle”); 29 C.F.R. § 785.41
(“Any work which an employee is required to perform while traveling must, of course, be counted
as hours worked”). Thus, if, during a commute, an employee performs activities that are integral
and indispensable to the principal activities he or she is employed to perform, or said principal
activities themselves, and not incidental to the use of an employer-provided vehicle for
commuting, then the time spent on those activities constitutes compensable hours worked even
though the activities occur during an otherwise non-compensable commute.
OPINION
A. Whether time spent receiving pages and calling clients to schedule their
appointments, including scheduling other field service engineers, is compensable
hours worked under the FLSA
Time spent receiving pages from your employer before you perform any other work-related
activities is likely not compensable worktime, whether performed at home or during your
commute. Both the Division and courts have concluded that these sorts of activities are usually
incidental to the use of an employer’s vehicle for commuting under ECFA.
4
In applying ECFA,
courts have held that merely receiving assignments from an employer is incidental to an
employee’s commute and not integral to an employee’s principal activities. See, e.g., Chambers v.
Sears Roebuck & Co., 428 F. App’x 400, 417 (5th Cir. 2011) (holding that receiving assignments
and transmitting activity reports while at home was required by the employer-provided vehicle
program and therefore incidental to the commute); Rutti v. Lojack Corp., Inc., 596 F.3d 1046, 1057
(9th Cir. 2010) (concluding that the time a car alarm technician spent before his shift “receiving,

commuting time, whose non-compensability predated and does not derive from the Portal Act, see WHD
Op. Ltr. FLSA2026-9, is not considered hours worked under the FLSA even if an employer has a contract,
custom, or practice to pay for it. See 29 C.F.R. § 785.34.
4
You have represented that the employer-provided vehicle you drive is of a type normally used for
commuting. This analysis assumes that the remaining criteria for ECFA have been met, i.e., that your travel
is within the normal commuting area for your employer’s establishment and that your use of the vehicle is
pursuant to an agreement with your employer.

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mapping, and prioritizing jobs and routes for assignment” was incidental to his commute rather
than integral to his principal activities); Robinson v. Gosiger Mach. Tools, LLC, 479 F. Supp. 3d
788, 790, 793–94 (N.D. Ind. 2020) (reviewing next day’s schedule and planning routes); Butler v.
DirectSAT USA, LLC, 55 F. Supp. 3d 793, 806–08 (D. Md. 2014) (reading emails to determine
appointments and mapping routes); Donatti v. Charter Comm’ns, L.L.C., 950 F. Supp. 2d 1038,
1053–54 (W.D. Mo. 2013) (checking first assignment of the day).

This is consistent with ECFA’s
plain meaning, as an activity is “incidental” to something else when it is “likely to ensue as a
chance or minor consequence.” Incidental, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (10th ed.
1998); see also Incidental, Oxford English Dictionary,
https://www.oed.com/dictionary/incidental_adj (“Occurring or liable to occur in fortuitous or
subordinate conjunction with something else of which it forms no essential part”).
Receiving assignments remotely is a minor consequence of driving an employer-provided vehicle
to and from home. Otherwise, an employee would have to report to a central work location to
receive assignments, which would frustrate the convenience of a program allowing employees who
work at multiple job sites per day to drive an employer-provided vehicle directly to and from home.
ECFA was enacted with such programs in mind. See Chambers, 428 F. App’x at 417 (explaining
that “[c]ommunication between the employee and employer to receive assignments or
instructions” is “incidental” to the use of an employer’s vehicle for commuting and thus not
compensable hours worked (citation omitted)); Rutti, 596 F.3d at 1053 (discussing the meaning of
“incidental” in ECFA). As you explained, you receive your assignments via pages. Therefore, the
minimal time it takes to receive each page before your workday begins is not compensable hours
worked because it is incidental to your commute in an employer-provided vehicle and thus
excepted from compensability by ECFA.
On the other hand, time spent calling clients to schedule and arrange the details of appointments,
including scheduling other field service engineers, constitutes compensable hours worked. These
activities are required by, and primarily benefit, your employer; therefore, they constitute work.
Furthermore, they are a critical element of your primary responsibilities, and consequently are not
incidental to your commute or otherwise preliminary but rather integral and indispensable to your
principal activity of installing and servicing medical equipment at your employer’s clients’
locations. Unlike simply receiving pages, communicating with clients to schedule appointments
is a necessary step to performing the services requested by them. See Butler, 55 F. Supp. 3d at 814
(no dispute that pre-calling customers is integral and indispensable); Espenscheid v. DirectSat
USA, LLC, No. 09-625, 2011 WL 10069108, at *22–23 (W.D. Wis. Apr. 11, 2011) (time spent
calling customers is “related uniquely to plaintiffs’ position as installation technicians” and
therefore compensable, but time spent receiving routes is not); accord Hall v. DIRECTV, LLC, 846
F.3d 757, 773 (4th Cir. 2017) (characterizing calling customers to confirm installations as
“essential to the installation and operation of DIRECTV products”); Tapia v. DIRECTV, Inc., No.
14-939, 2016 WL 9777179, at *2, *5 (D.N.M. June 22, 2016) (plaintiffs sufficiently pled that
calling customers to confirm installations was integral and indispensable to installing satellite
television service). The same is true of calling other field service engineers to ensure that clients’
service requests are fulfilled. Similarly, unlike receiving pages, which is specifically necessary for
you to receive assignments from home, one must call clients to schedule appointments in any event
if clients’ requests are to be fulfilled. This activity is thus intrinsic to the services you perform for
clients, and you cannot dispense with such work. See Integrity Staffing Sols., 574 U.S. at 35
(finding pre-shift security screenings of warehouse workers not integral or indispensable where

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the employer “could have eliminated the screenings altogether without impairing the employees’
ability to complete their work”). Accordingly, your time spent calling clients to schedule
appointments, including scheduling other engineers, is compensable hours worked.
To summarize, the minimal time you spend receiving pages is excluded from compensable time
under ECFA because it is incidental to your use of an employer-provided vehicle for commuting.
On the other hand, your time spent calling clients to schedule appointments, including scheduling
other engineers, is compensable and not excluded under ECFA or the Portal Act.
B. Whether all or some of your drive time to the first client location is compensable hours
worked under the FLSA in Scenario 1
Based on your representations, we assume that at least some working days in Scenario 1 proceed
as follows: you begin receiving pages at 7:00 a.m., receive five pages over the next hour, spend a
total of 50 minutes over the hour scheduling client appointments, and then begin driving to the
first worksite at 8:00 a.m. Under this set of facts, we conclude that your travel time to the first
client location would be compensable.
As an initial matter, travel under these circumstances is not excluded from worktime by ECFA or
other provisions of the Portal Act. Since the travel occurs after you have performed principal
activities—client calls—it takes place during the workday, not before or after it, and the Portal Act,
including ECFA, does not apply to time within the workday. See 29 C.F.R § 790.6(a). The
inapplicability of ECFA and the Portal Act does not end the inquiry, however, given our conclusion
that an “ordinary” or “normal” home-to-work commute is not worktime even if it takes place
during the workday. See WHD Op. Ltr. FLSA2026-9. The remaining question, therefore, is
whether the travel from home to your first worksite in this scenario is an ordinary commute.
Under the facts described above, we conclude that this travel is not an ordinary commute, but
rather compensable travel. We reach this conclusion based on the application of longstanding
FLSA principles to the totality of the circumstances. Here, not only are both the time and manner
of the travel based primarily on the employer’s needs rather than the employee’s choice, but your
employer is also requiring you to engage in substantial work both immediately before the travel,
when you spend most of an hour engaged in phone calls, and immediately after your travel, when
you work at your first worksite of the day. This bears few, if any, of the hallmarks of an ordinary
commute between an employee’s home and worksite. Indeed, under the circumstances described,
you lack virtually any of the types of freedom and flexibility that typically accompany an ordinary
home-to-work commute time, such as the choice of the mode of transportation, the choice of
departure time, and the ability to spend time on personal tasks before or during breaks in the travel.
For these reasons, we conclude that your travel is not, in fact, an “ordinary” commute that is non-
compensable regardless of when it occurs. To be clear, the Division would consider this sort of
travel to work to be explicitly excluded from compensability under the Portal Act if it were to
occur before or after the workday. See 29 U.S.C. § 254(a)(1). However, for the reasons set forth

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above, it constitutes compensable worktime because it both occurs during the workday and is not
an ordinary commute.
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The arrangement that you describe is distinguishable from many situations where travel between
home and work within the workday remains an ordinary, non-compensable commute. For
example, many employees who travel from site to site during the workday are required to complete
some administrative work at home beforehand or afterwards, but have a long window of time in
which to do so. For such employees, the home-to-work and work-to-home drives remain ordinary
commutes since the employees retain the same flexibility and freedom during and adjacent to the
travel that they would otherwise enjoy. See Kuebel, 643 F.3d at 360–61 (administrative duties
required to be completed at home do not render the commute compensable where they are not
required to be completed immediately before or after commuting); Rutti, 596 F.3d at 1059–61
(end-of-day transmission of completed jobs to employer does not extend workday where employee
had a 12-hour window in which to complete the task).
6
Likewise, where an employee, for the
employee’s own benefit, requests and receives permission to telework for part of the day instead
of working from the office, the travel between work and home remains an ordinary commute even
if the employee is required to work both immediately before and immediately after the travel, since
the travel remains primarily for the employee’s benefit. See WHD Op. Ltr. 2026-9 (concluding
that a commute is ordinary where the employee requests and receives permission from the
employer to telework part of the day); WHD Op. Ltr. FLSA2020-19 (home-to-work travel non-
compensable where employee requests and receives permission to attend personal appointments
between working in the office and at home).
We reach a different conclusion here based on your representations that you are sometimes
required (and accordingly must regularly plan) to spend the substantial majority of the hour before
your travel making calls to clients, and to other engineers as necessary, to fulfill clients’ service
requests, with any personal activities you undertake limited to those you can perform
simultaneously with (or in very short breaks between) your work duties, before you immediately
travel to your first worksite at the time and in the manner directed by your employer. See, e.g.,
Gomley v. Crossmark, Inc., No. 1:13-420, 2015 WL 1825481, at *4 (D. Idaho Apr. 22, 2015)
(denying summary judgment where plaintiff provided evidence she was required to perform
administrative tasks at home immediately before driving to first worksite); Butler, 55 F. Supp. 3d

5
Also, we do not consider the travel to be off-duty time, since, under these circumstances, you are neither
completely relieved from duty nor free to use the travel time effectively for your own purposes. 29 C.F.R.
§ 785.16.
6
See also Garcia v. Crossmark, Inc., 157 F. Supp. 3d 1046, 1049 (D.N.M. 2015) (administrative tasks
performed at home that were not required to be performed immediately before or after commute between
home and office did not render commute compensable); Ahle v. Veracity Research Co., 738 F. Supp. 2d
896, 917 (D. Minn. 2010) (work activities performed at home did not extend the workday to include
commute where employees were not required to perform the activities immediately before leaving home or
immediately after returning home); WHD Op. Ltr., 1999 WL 1002360, at * 2 (Jan. 29, 1999) (work activities
performed at home do not necessarily turn work-to-home or home-to-work travel into compensable
worksite-to-worksite travel). These holdings apply only to home-to-work or work-to-home travel; in
contrast, worksite-to-worksite travel is worktime even if it occurs before or after a non-compensable off-
duty period. See Sec’y U.S. Dep’t of Labor v. Nursing Home Care Mgmt., 128 F.4th 146, 156–57 (3d Cir.
2025); United Transp. Union Local 1745, 178 F.3d at 1118–19.

10

at 814–18 (same); Harris v. Reliable Reports Inc., No. 1:13-210, 2014 WL 931070, at *5 (N.D.
Ind. Mar. 10, 2014) (denying motion to dismiss where plaintiff alleged such facts); Bowman v.
Crossmark, Inc., No. 3:09-16, 2012 WL 2597875, at *8 (E.D. Tenn. July 5, 2012) (denying
summary judgment); see also WHD Op. Ltr. FLSA2020-19, at 5 & n.19. To the extent that your
workday regularly differs from this scenario, your drive may instead be a non-compensable
ordinary commute, depending on all the circumstances.
7

Finally, we note that to the extent that your time spent calling clients and other engineers from
home is subject to considerable variability from day to day and week to week such that it is difficult
to determine your exact hours worked at home, employers and employees have means of
determining compensation for such time: a written mutual agreement. Specifically, where an
employee performs some work activities at home and the exact time spent on such activities is
difficult to determine, the employer and employee may be permitted to enter into a “reasonable
agreement . . . which takes into consideration all of the pertinent facts” to ensure sufficient
compensation for the hours worked. 29 C.F.R. § 785.23; see Brock v. City of Cincinnati, 236 F.3d
793, 805 (6th Cir. 2001); Halferty v. Pulse Drug Co., 864 F.2d 1185, 1190–91 (5th Cir. 1989).
Thus, you and your employer have the option to come to such an agreement to ensure that you are
compensated for periods of work that are difficult to measure with exactitude. See Brock, 236 F.3d
at 805 (relying on 29 C.F.R. § 785.23 to permit reasonable agreements in circumstances “where
unsupervised employees can divide their time between ‘work’ and personal pursuits”). You have
not represented that such an agreement exists here.
C. Whether all or some of your drive time to the first client location is compensable hours
worked under the FLSA in Scenario 2
As explained above, an employee’s ordinary home-to-work travel, whether the employee works at
a fixed location or at different job sites, is a normal incident of employment and not compensable.
See WHD Op. Ltr. FLSA2026-9. Additionally, the Portal Act, as amended by ECFA, does not
require compensation for travel to the place of performance of an employee’s principal activities
when such travel precedes the performance of principal activities, and further provides that travel
in an employer-provided vehicle within the normal commuting area is not such an activity. As a
general matter, therefore, when you begin your commute before performing any work activities
for the day, your employer’s practice of compensating pre-shift travel time only in excess of one
hour is acceptable. See WHD Op. Ltr., 1999 WL 1002360, at *2 (“We would not take exception
to a practice that treats one hour of commuting time as non-compensable home-to-work travel, and

7
See Armour & Co., 323 U.S. at 133 (whether inactive time is “predominantly for the employer’s benefit,”
and therefore compensable, “or for the employee’s,” and therefore non-compensable, “is a question
dependent upon all the circumstances of the case”); Llorca v. Sheriff, Collier County, Fla., 893 F.3d 1319,
1324 (11th Cir. 2018) (the inquiry into whether travel time between home and work is compensable is “fact-
intensive and not amenable to bright-line rules”); Naylor v. Securiguard, Inc., 801 F.3d 501, 506 (5th Cir.
2015) (where the critical question is whether time is predominantly for the benefit of the employer or for
the employee, the court considers “whether the employees are subject to real limitations on their personal
freedom which inure to the benefit of the employer; whether restrictions are placed on the employee’s
activities during those times . . . ; whether the employee remains responsible for substantial work-related
duties; and how frequently the time is actually interrupted by work-related duties” (quoting Bernard v. IBP,
Inc. of Neb., 154 F.3d 259, 265 (5th Cir. 1998))).

11

that treats all travel time in excess of that amount as hours worked”). In the second scenario you
have described, however, while on your way to the first client location, you are also calling clients
between 7:00 a.m. and 8:00 a.m. to schedule their appointments, and this activity occupies the
substantial majority of the hour on at least some workdays. As discussed above, this activity is
assigned by, and chiefly benefits your employer, such that it is work and furthermore, it is not
incidental to your commute or a preliminary or postliminary activity, but rather integral and
indispensable to your primary or principal activity of installing and servicing medical equipment
at client sites. These activities are therefore compensable, and your workday begins when you
perform such activities. See Johnson v. RGIS Inventory Specialists, 554 F. Supp. 2d 693, 708–09
(E.D. Tex. 2007) (performance of principal activities in a company van en route to the job site
begins the continuous workday).
As a result, in the example you provided in the second scenario, the beginning of your travel time
(from 6:00 a.m. until at least 7:00 a.m.) is ordinary home-to-work travel and not compensable.
Your workday commences when you begin calling clients to schedule their appointments, and the
rest of your travel time from your first client call until you arrive at your first client location is
compensable. As previously stated, we have based our conclusions on the assumption that you
must regularly plan to spend much of the time between 7:00 a.m. and 8:00 a.m. scheduling client
appointments. Your remaining travel time is compensable because calling clients is your first
principal activity of the day and you must perform that activity throughout your travel. Even more
so than when you are required to perform principal activities at home immediately before your
commute, being required to perform them throughout your drive to your first worksite of the day
prevents you from exercising the freedom and flexibility associated with the ordinary home-to-
work commute.
We do not consider whether—or at what point—a less extensive amount of time spent on calls
while traveling to your first worksite might affect whether your entire travel time after your first
call would constitute hours worked.
8
Finally, we do not consider whether your employer’s current
compensation practices (i.e., paying you for a regular shift from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. regardless
of the timing of your first and last appointments, plus overtime for travel to and from home in
excess of an hour) might sufficiently compensate you for all hours worked, as any such
consideration would require additional facts.
This letter is an official interpretation of the governing statutes and regulations by the
Administrator of the Wage and Hour Division of the United States Department of Labor for the
purposes of the Portal Act. See 29 U.S.C. § 259. This interpretation may be relied upon in
accordance with section 10 of the Portal Act, notwithstanding that after any such act or omission
in the course of such reliance, the interpretation is “modified or rescinded or is determined by
judicial authority to be invalid or of no legal effect.” Id.

8
See Smith v. Aztec Well Servicing Co., 462 F.3d 1274, 1291 (10th Cir. 2006) (compensable work activities
that are required to be performed during commute may render the entire commute compensable depending
on their extent); N.Y.C. Transit Auth., 45 F.3d at 651–52 (occasional dog-care work performed during police
officers’ commute was compensable itself but did not render entire commute compensable). Under any
circumstances, the time spent engaged in calls would be worktime. See 29 C.F.R. § 785.41.

12

We trust that this letter is responsive to your inquiry.
Sincerely,

Andrew B. Rogers
Administrator

*Note: The actual name(s) was removed to protect privacy in accordance with 5 U.S.C.
§ 552(b)(6). You represent that you do not seek this opinion for any party that the Wage and Hour
Division (WHD) is currently investigating or for any litigation that commenced prior to your
request. This opinion is based exclusively on the facts and circumstances described in your request
and is given based on your representation, express or implied, that you have provided a full and
fair description of all the facts and circumstances that would be pertinent to our consideration of
the question presented. The existence of any other factual or historical background not contained
in your letter might require a conclusion different from the one expressed herein.