Articles Tagged with overtime pay

Your employer sends you to Texas for a training course. The company pays for your airfare, hotel, meals, and other travel expenses. The training ends, and you fly back to California. Does your employer have to pay you for the hours you spend traveling home? And if the trip takes long enough, could you also be entitled to overtime? For California employees, the answer may be yes.

One common source of confusion is the difference between reimbursement of travel expenses and compensation for travel time. An employer might pay for your plane ticket, hotel, rental car, meals, and other expenses. That does not necessarily satisfy the employer’s obligation to pay wages for your time.

The separate question is whether the employee’s travel itself constitutes compensable working time. California generally focuses on whether an employee is subject to the employer’s control. When an employer requires a nonexempt employee to travel somewhere for work, the time spent traveling may constitute compensable hours worked—even though the employee isn’t performing his or her ordinary job duties while sitting on an airplane or traveling to the destination. This can be particularly important when an employee is required to attend an out-of-town conference, training program, meeting, or other company event. Federal travel-time rules can produce a different analysis. California employers therefore should not assume that compliance with federal wage law necessarily means they have complied with California law.