Human Resource Blog

Maryland Travel Time and FLSA

In Maryland, does an employer have to pay an employee for travel time during the work day? Does it matter if the worker is driving his own car, instead of a company car?

The issue of travel time has created some interesting questions among employees and employers in the state of Maryland.

The federal Fair Labor Standards Act was created in 1938. It covers not only this particular issue, but also the minimum wage, and the requirement of overtime payments to employees who work for any amount of time over 40 hours in a week.

According to FLSA legislation, employers do have to pay workers for travel time that is spent going to the first job site of his or her day. The caveat here is that the job site has to lie outside of the employer’s general commuting area. Surprisingly, there are no laws in existence that have created standards for defining precisely what a general commuting area is.

For most purposes, this area is much larger in big cities than it is in smaller towns. To explain further, a 20-mile trip in a small town could feasibly be thought of as being outside of an employer’s general commuting area. A 60-mile trip in New York City, however, might actually fall within a general commuting area for an employer.

Essentially, employers look at the situation this way. Workers have to commute to work in one way or another, and this traveling time is done on the worker’s own time. Therefore, traveling to the first job site of a day should count as a worker’s general commute.

The situation might be different if the employer required a worker to travel to his or her first job site of the day on a special assignment that was only going to last for that one day. In such a case, the worker should get paid for the time that she or he spends commuting.

When workers travel to numerous job sites in a day, the travel time between those different sites must be paid. Different rules would apply if that individual had to spend the night in another town. JH