by Charlie Plumb

Employers aren’t required to pay nonexempt employees for the time they spend commuting between their home and work to begin their workday or after ending their workday. Travel time during the workday is often compensable, however, and should be recorded and counted as hours worked for potential overtime. A home health agency recently learned this the hard way.

Home health aides

Prestige Home Care Agency, a home healthcare service operated by Nursing Home Care Management, Inc., employed aides who provided in-home healthcare services to its clients. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), the aides were considered nonexempt employees who were entitled to overtime for any hours worked in excess of 40 during a workweek.

In the course of a workday, aides often served multiple clients, which required them to travel from one client’s home to another to provide care. Prestige didn’t record the aides’ travel time, nor did it treat the time spent traveling between clients’ homes as compensable hours worked. After a wide-ranging investigation, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) sued Prestige over its recordkeeping and compensation practices for workday travel.

Workday travel and the FLSA

The DOL did not contend Prestige’s aides should be paid for any travel time before they started providing home healthcare for the day or after they completed their final visit of the day, but it did seek compensation for the time aides traveled “between the start of the first client’s appointment and the end of the last client’s appointment.” According to a federal appeals court, the DOL was right.

As a general rule, an employee is on duty and entitled to compensation so long as they are unable to use the time for their own purposes. The FLSA requires compensation for work-related travel during an individual’s workday. Travel time that is necessary for an employee to go between jobsites or assignments during a workday is compensable under the FLSA, meaning the travel time must be recorded as hours worked. Under the circumstances, the appeals court had no problem finding Prestige should be recording the time its aides traveled between clients’ homes during their workdays and compensating them for that time. Dept. of Labor v. Nursing Home Care Management, Inc., 23-2284 (3rd Cir., 1/31/25).

Check yourself

Home healthcare agencies aren’t the only businesses whose employees travel between sites during the workday. Although employers aren’t required to pay nonexempt employees for normal commuting time before and after the workday, they must accurately record any time employees spend travelling between assigned duties during the workday and then pay them accordingly for that time. Avoid the nasty surprise Prestige received from the DOL.

Charlie Plumb is an attorney in the Tulsa, Oklahoma, office of McAfee & Taft and can be reached at charlie.plumb@mcafeetaft.com.