Do you have to pay techs for drive time?

The FLSA draws one line through the day, and travel time pay for HVAC and plumbing techs follows it: an employee's ordinary commute is not work time, and travel that is part of the work is.

The travel-time rules the Department of Labor publishes count the drives the job requires.

A special one-day assignment in another city counts as work time — minus the usual home-to-depot commute and meal time — because the travel was performed for the employer's benefit.

Overnight travel away from home is work time whenever it cuts across the employee's normal working hours, including the corresponding hours on Saturday and Sunday.

Two details from those rules matter on a service fleet.

DOL's enforcement policy does not count time an employee spends as a passenger on overnight travel outside regular working hours — and that exclusion is written for passengers: a tech driving the company truck is not one.

And time a new tech spends riding along, including the driving between calls, is paid work time.

It counts unless all four tests for unpaid training time are met — outside regular hours, truly voluntary, not directly job-related, and no productive work — and a new-tech ride-along fails them, because the time is job-related by definition.

Our guide to hiring and training green techs builds the ride-along into a first-90-days plan.

Travel that counts as work time goes into the overtime hours — flat rate included.

The regular-rate math that turns those hours into overtime pay is its own topic, and our guide to overtime for flat-rate and commissioned techs owns it; how a chosen pay plan delivers the wages is the other half, covered in our breakdown of hourly, flat rate and commission pay plans.

One gap we will not paper over: the rules above are the travel-time rules our research verified by name, and both describe travel beyond a routine local service day.

We did not verify a rule that addresses the ordinary drive between two stops on a local route on its own, and we will not fill that gap by assumption.

The safe employer posture is to treat the between-calls drive as paid time, and to take boundary cases — long cross-town runs, depot detours, split shifts — to DOL's Wage and Hour Division or an employment attorney before you rely on them.

Ordinarily no. Normal travel from home to work is not work time under the FLSA, and DOL's rule is explicit that this holds whether the tech works at a fixed location or at different job sites.

Home to the shop and home to the first customer's door are both ordinary commuting — the first address of the day is where the commute ends and the work begins — so neither goes on the timesheet.

A shop-first start does not change the commute itself.

The drive from home to the shop is the same home-to-work travel the rule does not count.

Where first-call arrangements get expensive is the boundary: a tech who starts working before the wheels roll.

The federal carve-out that keeps the commute unpaid reaches only the drive — work done at home before leaving, such as loading parts from the truck or taking the first dispatch in the driveway, can start the workday.

If your schedule has techs starting from home, decide what counts as clock-in and write it down; the take-home-truck section below covers the carve-out's conditions.

Where the first drive of the day starts from a night call-out instead of the morning commute, the question is really about standby and call-out pay — its own policy question, one to settle in an on call pay policy rather than inside your drive-time rules.

The truck does not automatically turn the commute into paid time.

Under the Portal-to-Portal Act — as amended by the Employee Commuting Flexibility Act — driving the employer's vehicle between home and the first or last job is not paid work time when two conditions hold: the travel stays within the normal commuting area for the employer's business, and the use of the vehicle is covered by an agreement with the employee.

Take-home trucks run on that carve-out, and both conditions do real work: the commuting area bounds how far the unpaid drive can stretch, and the agreement is what a written take home vehicle policy documents.

The carve-out protects the drive, not work done before it.

A tech who loads parts from the truck at home, or takes the first dispatch call before pulling out, can start the workday in the driveway — our research flags exactly this pattern and did not push further into where the line sits.

If your techs start from home, keep the before-you-leave work list at zero, or pay from the moment the work starts.

Keep the IRS's separate answer out of the pay question.

For tax purposes, a marked service van of 14,000 pounds or less loaded, with seating for the driver only (or driver plus one) and permanent shelving, is a qualified nonpersonal use vehicle — so personal use such as commuting is not a taxable fringe.

Where the vehicle does not qualify, the IRS's commuting rule instead values each one-way commute at $1.50 and includes it in wages.

That is tax treatment, not paid time: a commute can be tax-free at the same time it is unpaid under the FLSA, and settling the one never settles the other.

What the truck does off the clock still matters to your insurer — MVR checks for techs who drive company trucks cover the driving-record side.

The answers above are federal — the floor DOL enforces — and state wage-and-hour law sits on top of it.

California is the running example of a state adding its own requirements, and three of them are verified in our research: employers with 15 or more employees must include the pay scale in any job posting under Labor Code 432.3; contracts entered on or after January 1, 2026 cannot require a worker to repay a debt or pay a penalty or fee for leaving — the stay-or-pay terms AB 692 makes unlawful; and California does not conform to the federal suspension of unreimbursed employee expense deductions, so its state return still allows them as an itemized deduction.

None of those three is a drive-time rule, and that is the honest limit of this section: our research did not verify whether California — or any state — counts drive time differently from the FLSA, and we will not guess at a wage-and-hour answer that consequential.

Treat the federal rules on this page as the minimum, and confirm the state layer before you finalize the practice.

Your state's labor department can tell you how its wage-and-hour rules treat drive time; an employment attorney licensed in your state can tell you how they treat yours.

The same discipline runs through the whole topic.

Pay the travel the rules count, paper the commuting carve-out's two conditions, keep work-at-home starts off the schedule or on the clock, and put the whole thing in one dated policy.

The rest of the employment stack — sourcing, screening, offers, onboarding — is our guide to hiring HVAC and plumbing techs.

This page is employer career and business information, not legal advice. The travel-time rules summarized here are U.S. Department of Labor regulations, the vehicle rules are the IRS's, and state wage-and-hour law adds a layer this page did not verify — confirm what applies to your company with DOL's Wage and Hour Division and your state labor agency, and have an employment attorney review your drive-time pay practice.