A Nevada employee asks, “My job requires me to travel from the warehouse to different work sites during the day. My employer wants to pay me separately for the travel time between sites. Does that affect my overtime?”

No it does not. In fact, if the employer is paying travel time separately, it could be a violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). According to this federal law, employees who put in more than 40 hours a week are entitled to overtime pay at 1.5 times their usual hourly rate.

Travel time between work sites, according to this law is considered “all in a day’s work” and, must be counted as work time.

Consider Jose who works for a warehousing company. Every day he drives from home to work, receives his schedule for service calls, then travels to those calls in a company vehicle. His travel time from home to work, and from work to home is not considered work time, but his time traveling between service calls is. So is his trip from the warehouse to the job site.

If Jose works 37 hours this week and is entitled to 10 hours of travel time, his total for the week is 47 hours. He is entitled to 40 hours of straight time and 7 hours of overtime pay. The employer must pay the overtime or be in violation of federal law.

Not all of an employee’s time, however, has to be paid at the same rate. To illustrate: Linda is a carpenter and earns $20 per hour for her work. Her travel time, however, is paid at a rate of $10 per hour. This differential between work and travel pay is completely legal. If Linda works more than 40 hours during the week, her overtime is calculated using her average rate for the week.

The calculations would be as follows: Linda works 25 hours and spends 25 hours traveling. Her average rate for the week is $15 (25 hours at $20 + 25 hours at $10, divided by two). Her overtime rate would be 1.5 times $15, or $22.50 per hour.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 27th, 2010 at 5:23 am and is filed under Labor & Employment Laws, Mandatory Overtime Laws. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.