Employers are not required to pay non-exempt employees for the time they spend commuting between their home and work to begin their workday or after ending their workday. However, travel time during the workday is often compensable and should be recorded and counted as hours worked for potential overtime. A home health agency recently learned this the hard way.
The 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 non-exempt 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 did not record the aides’ travel time, nor did they 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 or after an aide started providing home healthcare for 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 job sites or assignments during a workday is compensable under the FLSA, meaning that 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.
Check yourself
Home healthcare agencies are not the only businesses whose employees travel between sites during the workday. While employers are not required to pay non-exempt employees for normal commuting time before and after the workday ends, 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.
- Dept. of Labor v. Nursing Home Care Management, Inc., 23-2284 (3rd Cir. 1/31/25)
