Travel Time Pay for Construction Workers: When You Must Pay (2026 FLSA Guide)

A crew drives two hours from home to a remote jobsite, then another 40 minutes to a second site mid-shift. Which of those hours do you have to pay? Getting travel time pay wrong is one of the most expensive mistakes in construction payroll, because unpaid compensable travel usually surfaces as unpaid overtime, and that comes with back wages plus liquidated damages. This guide walks the federal rules, the Davis-Bacon and state twists, and the line between travel-time wages and per diem. It is general information, not legal advice, so confirm your situation with employment counsel.

When is travel time pay required for construction workers?

The starting rule under the Portal-to-Portal Act is that an ordinary commute is not paid, even for a construction worker who reports to a different site each day: "normal travel from home to work is not worktime". Four situations flip that default and turn travel into paid hours worked. The table sums them up, and the detail follows.

• ‍Jobsite to jobsite is paid, and so is the drive from a required yard: Travel between sites during the workday is hours worked. The trap most construction employers miss is the muster point: if crews must first report to a yard or shop to load tools or get instructions, the drive from there to the site is paid regardless of any contract, custom, or practice. A mandatory report-to-the-yard rule quietly converts the whole onward drive into paid time. Running crew travel through one construction travel management system at least gives payroll a clean record of every trip to apply these rules to.‍
• A special one-day trip to a distant site is paid, with one deduction: When you send a worker on a one-day assignment to another city, that travel is for your benefit and counts, though you may deduct the portion equal to their normal home-to-work commute and bona fide meal time. The deduction is permissive and limited to the normal commute, not the whole trip.‍
• Overnight travel is paid during normal working hours, even on a weekend: For travel that keeps a worker away from home overnight, time that cuts across their normal working hours is worktime, and the counterintuitive part is that this includes the same hours on non-workdays. If a crew normally works 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., travel during those hours on a Saturday or Sunday is paid. Regular meal periods do not count.

Driver or passenger: who is on the clock?

Anyone who drives, or who is required to ride along as an assistant or helper, is working the entire time, apart from bona fide meals or employer-provided sleep facilities. So the person behind the wheel of the crew truck is always on the clock.

A pure passenger is treated differently, but the rule is narrower than it looks. The Wage and Hour Division, as an enforcement policy rather than a statutory exemption, will not treat as worktime the time a worker spends as a passenger outside their normal working hours. Two limits matter: a passenger traveling during normal hours is still paid, and this is federal policy that several states reject, as the state section below shows.

Davis-Bacon travel time: prevailing wage vs the commute

On federally funded construction, Davis-Bacon sets the prevailing wage for work performed at the "site of the work," which is the physical construction site plus support sites tied to that contract, like the tool yard or batch plant. Travel to and from that site is not itself prevailing-wage work. Whether the travel is paid at all is still an FLSA question answered by the rules above, not a Davis-Bacon requirement.

Two points keep contractors out of audit trouble. Davis-Bacon does not require you to pay for travel time; it fixes the rate for on-site labor. And travel or subsistence payments are "not normally" a fringe benefit under the Act, so they cannot be used to top up the prevailing wage and are reported separately from wages on certified payroll. 

State rules that beat the FLSA: California and Washington

The FLSA is a floor, not a ceiling, and several states pay travel time the federal rules would not. California is the sharpest example. Its "hours worked" standard turns on employer control, and in Morillion v. Royal Packing the state Supreme Court held that time workers are required to spend traveling on employer-mandated transportation is compensable. In practice, if a California crew is required to ride a company vehicle from a mandatory yard, that time can be paid even as a passenger and even outside normal hours, and California adds daily overtime past eight hours, which makes a miscount costlier.

Washington runs the same direction: state policy treats required out-of-town travel as hours worked and rejects the federal passenger carve-out. Because rules vary state by state, check the labor agency for every state you send crews into rather than assuming the FLSA is the whole story.

Travel time pay vs per diem and mileage

These are separate buckets, and conflating them is a common and costly error. Compensable travel time is wages: it counts as hours worked and pushes toward the 40-hour overtime line. Per diem, lodging, and mileage are expense reimbursement, not wages, so they do not count as hours and do not satisfy an obligation to pay for travel time. Paying a generous per diem does not discharge the duty to pay for a compensable drive.

For the reimbursement side, the federal per-diem benchmark is $178 a day, $110 for lodging and $68 for meals and incidentals, binding on federal travelers and widely adopted by private employers as a substantiation reference. Mileage has two rates in 2026: 72.5 cents a mile for the first half of the year and 76 cents from July 1 onward. Neither is a wage. How those expense lines fit the wider budget sits in the guide to major expenses in construction travel and the estimating and forecasting of those costs.

The stakes are real. Construction is one of the industries where the Wage and Hour Division recovers the most back wages, and travel-time errors typically show up as overtime violations, so the exposure is the unpaid time plus the time-and-a-half premium plus potential liquidated damages.

Where a travel platform fits, and where it does not

Be clear on scope: a travel platform is not a payroll or wage-and-hour system, and ITILITE does not calculate travel-time pay or decide what is compensable. That belongs to your payroll team and your counsel. What a platform does is sit upstream of the problem. Booking crews on direct routes with fewer layovers trims the travel that turns into paid hours in the first place, and keeping one record of who traveled where and when gives payroll a clean source to reference when it applies the rules above.

It also keeps the reimbursement side, per diem and mileage, in its own lane and coded to the job, so nobody mistakes an expense allowance for a wage. That is the honest boundary: ITILITE handles the booking, records, and expense of crew travel through its construction travel program and travel and expense cards for construction companies, while the pay decision stays with the people who own it. The everyday tactics live in the cost-saving tips for construction business travel.