When must you pay for travel undertaken by your employees? How do you calculate and pay for travel time? Do your employees understand the policies you have in place?

Wage and hour litigation and Department of Labor (DOL) enforcement remain two of the hottest HR challenges. Last year alone, the DOL’s Wage and Hour Division received 40,000 complaints, a 15-percent increase from the previous year. It’s more important than ever to understand your obligations. In a BLR webinar titled "Wage & Hour Road Rules for HR: Employee Travel Pay Explained," Michael G. Petrie outlined the circumstances under which employers may be obligated to pay for travel.

In the webinar, Petrie examined over a dozen pay for travel scenarios. Here are four of them.

Pay For Travel Scenario 1: Home to Work in Emergency Situations

"There’s basically two different circumstances that you can imagine here: An employee who has completed his work day and goes home at the end of the work day, but is subsequently called back to travel a substantial distance for an emergency. The employee is going to be brought back to one of two places: either the normal work site, or perhaps there’s a circumstance where the employee would be called back to an off-site location or customer’s location. Depending on where the person is asked to go to will determine whether or not that time is going to be considered compensable." Petrie noted. Generally, an employee performing an emergency job for one of his employer’s customers at a location other than the normal work site is working when travelling.

However, employers take note: the DOL has taken no position on when an employee is called back to the regular place of business, but many advise that such a commute should be considered compensable work time. There is some flexibility in the regulations to work out a common-sense approach.

Pay For Travel Scenario 2: Travel That’s All in a Day’s Work

Time spent by an employee in travel as part of their principal activity, such as travel from job site to job site, is compensable work time.

Pay For Travel Scenario 3: Home to Work on a Special One Day Assignment in Another City

If an employee normally works in one location, and has a special one day assignment in another city and returns home on the same day, all time spent travelling to and from the other city is work time.

However, there is an exception: an employer may deduct the time the employee would normally spend commuting to the regular work site.

Pay For Travel Scenario 4: Travel Away from Home Community

Travel that keeps an employee away from home overnight is "travel away from home." Such travel is considered work time when it cuts across the employee’s regular workday. This applies to travel on regular work days during normal working hours, and also travel during corresponding hours on non-working days.

However, time spent in travel away from home outside regular working hours as a passenger on an airplane, train, boat, bus or automobile is treated as not compensable. Be careful with this, however, as with today’s technology it is easy to turn non-compensable time into compensable time. Petrie explained: "The use of cell phones and smart phones and email devices (things like that), has entered into the discussion because now it’s possible for employees to check their email from home, while they’re on the train, while they’re sitting at a stoplight (even though they shouldn’t) – it’s possible for employees to be plugged-in to their work virtually all the time.

"If an employee spends a significant amount of their time checking emails and doing that sort of work and the employer allows it and encourages it, that sort of activity could be sufficient to change non-work time into work time. . . If you don’t want someone to engage in that sort of work during non-working time, you should specify that in your policies."

For an examination of 5 other pay travel scenarios, such as use of private automobiles and work performed while traveling, see part two of this article.

For more information on travel pay, order the webinar recording. To register for a future webinar, visit http://catalog.blr.com/audio.

Attorney Michael G. Petrie practices in the areas of employment litigation and labor and employment counseling at Jorden Burt LLP in Simsbury, Connecticut. He represents employers and management in claims of discrimination, harassment, retaliation, wrongful termination, breach of employment contracts, violation of wage and hour laws, negligence/intentional infliction of emotional distress, and other employment disputes.