Determining how to compensate employees who travel on company business can be confusing. Here, we present two questions sent in by subscribers, followed by answers from BLR legal experts.

Q: We have an exempt employee who attended training during the weekend. Airplane travel was required. Actual time spent in training was 4 hours. The employee is requesting an additional day of comp time. We are not a public sector employer. Do we have to grant the additional day?

A: When employees are exempt, compensatory time off in lieu of monetary pay is generally not an issue, because they are not entitled to overtime pay. If your organization has a policy or practice of providing exempt employees with paid time off for attending training on weekends, the policy should be applied to the current situation, consistent with what you've done in the past.

For nonexempt employees, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) permits public sector employers, as you note, to substitute comp time off for monetary pay. But private employers are not permitted to grant comp time except under very narrow circumstances, and then only to nonexempt workers.

Q: We are requiring a nonexempt employee to travel from the city where she normally works to another city for a one-day assignment. She will not have to stay overnight. How much of her travel time must be compensated?

A: Let's assume you are in Washington, D.C., and you send the employee to New York City for a one-day assignment. Since she is not staying overnight, she must be paid for all her travel hours, even those that do not intersect with her normal work hours. So if she leaves her home an hour earlier than usual and arrives home 2 hours later than normal, that travel time must be compensated, as well as the time she spends actually working at the remote site. Were she to stay overnight (normally at your expense), however, she would be paid for travel time only if it coincided with her work hours.

Note the apparently contradictory situations in the second question regarding whether the employee must stay overnight at a remote site. Because of confusing and vague terminology used in the FLSA, employee travel time is probably one of the grayest areas in the law. As we saw in the first question, travel time compensation applies only to nonexempt employees. Exempt employees are paid the same amount every week, regardless of how much or how little work they perform in that week.

In general, the time a nonexempt employee spends traveling is considered compensable if (1) the travel is required by or for the convenience of the employer or (2) work is performed during travel. But the Portal-to-Portal Act of 1947 eliminated pay for what is seen as “commuting time,” or the normal travel that workers do between their homes and their workplaces. For a TV repair person who works from a truck and travels among customers' sites, for example, the workday doesn't begin until he or she reaches the first stop of the day and ends only when he or she leaves the premises of the last customer of the day. But the person must also be compensated for any work performed during the commute home or at home.