The U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division issued two opinion letters on July 22, 2026 that set out when a field service worker’s paid day begins. Accepting a dispatch page at home does not start it. Calling clients to schedule the day’s appointments does — and once the day has started, the drive to the first job site counts as hours worked.
The letters, FLSA2026-9 and FLSA2026-10, were signed by Wage and Hour Administrator Andrew B. Rogers. Both are official interpretations for purposes of the Portal-to-Portal Act, and both are fact-specific: each answers the question a particular requester asked, on the facts that requester described.
What FLSA2026-10 decided
The requester in FLSA2026-10 is a field service engineer who installs and services MRI systems at hospitals and imaging sites. He has no office to report to. His paid shift runs 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and his first appointment can be as early as 8:00 a.m. Between 7:00 and 8:00 the employer sends three to five service requests through an internal paging system; accepting each page takes about 15 seconds, and he then calls each client back, 5 to 10 minutes per call, sometimes reassigning work to other engineers. He drives an employer-provided SUV at no personal cost.
The division reached three separate conclusions.
Receiving the pages is not paid time. The letter treats it as incidental to commuting in an employer-provided vehicle, an exception created by the Employee Commuting Flexibility Act:
“the minimal time it takes to receive each page before your workday begins is not compensable hours worked because it is incidental to your commute in an employer-provided vehicle and thus excepted from compensability by ECFA.”
The division cited Chambers v. Sears Roebuck & Co. and Rutti v. Lojack Corp., in which courts held that receiving assignments, mapping routes and prioritizing jobs were incidental to a commute rather than integral to the job itself.
Calling clients is paid time. The division drew a line between receiving work and doing it:
“time spent calling clients to schedule and arrange the details of appointments, including scheduling other field service engineers, constitutes compensable hours worked. These activities are required by, and primarily benefit, your employer.”
Those calls, the letter said, are “integral and indispensable” to the principal activity of servicing equipment at client sites.
The drive depends on where the calls happen. In the first scenario, the engineer makes all his calls at home and leaves at 8:00 a.m. The division concluded “that your travel time to the first client location would be compensable” — not an ordinary commute, because the employer dictates both the timing and the manner of the travel and requires substantial work immediately before and after it:
“you lack virtually any of the types of freedom and flexibility that typically accompany an ordinary home-to-work commute time, such as the choice of the mode of transportation, the choice of departure time, and the ability to spend time on personal tasks before or during breaks in the travel.”
In the second scenario, the engineer leaves home at 6:00 a.m. for an 8:30 a.m. appointment and makes the same calls from the vehicle between 7:00 and 8:00. There, the clock starts partway through the drive:
“the beginning of your travel time (from 6:00 a.m. until at least 7:00 a.m.) is ordinary home-to-work travel and not compensable. Your workday commences when you begin calling clients to schedule their appointments, and the rest of your travel time from your first client call until you arrive at your first client location is compensable.”
The companion letter cuts the other way
FLSA2026-9 answers an employer that wanted to let non-exempt office staff — administrative support, bookkeeping clerks — split a workday between home and the office, and worried that the mid-day commute would become compensable as a result.
The division said it would not, in all three scenarios presented, because the travel “would be an ‘ordinary’ commute that is a normal incident of employment and thus primarily benefits the employee.” It then used the letter to announce a broader rule:
“an ‘ordinary’ or ‘normal’ commute represents a third category of time, in addition to off-duty time and bona fide meal breaks, that is not worktime even if it occurs during the continuous workday.”
The distinction between the two letters is who the arrangement serves. In FLSA2026-9 the employee requests the split day for personal convenience. In FLSA2026-10 the employer sets the timing and requires the work. FLSA2026-10 also notes that employees who must complete administrative work at home but have a wide window in which to do it keep an ordinary, unpaid commute, citing Kuebel and a case in which the worker had a 12-hour window.
How closely this maps to the trades
The requester services medical imaging equipment, not building systems, and the division’s analysis is tied to the facts he described. Neither letter mentions a licensed trade.
The mechanism, however, is the service-call workday: an employer-provided van, a morning dispatch, customer calls before the first stop. That pattern is common in HVAC and refrigeration work, among electricians, and in plumbing and pipefitting. Whether the analysis reaches any particular technician depends on that technician’s own facts — how much work the employer requires before the drive, and whether it must be done immediately before leaving.
What the division did not decide
FLSA2026-10 assumes the engineer must regularly plan to spend most of the 7:00-to-8:00 hour on calls. The division declined to say what a lighter call load would mean:
“We do not consider whether—or at what point—a less extensive amount of time spent on calls while traveling to your first worksite might affect whether your entire travel time after your first call would constitute hours worked.”
It also declined to decide whether the employer’s existing pay practice — a flat 8-to-5 shift plus overtime for home travel beyond an hour — already covers all hours worked, saying that question would require additional facts. And as with every opinion letter, the conclusion rests on the requester’s representation that he described all pertinent facts.
What happens next
Neither letter has an effective date. Opinion letters interpret existing law rather than change it, and they do not bind courts.
They do carry one concrete protection. Under section 10 of the Portal-to-Portal Act, 29 U.S.C. § 259, an employer that relies on the interpretation in good faith retains that defense even if the interpretation is later “modified or rescinded or is determined by judicial authority to be invalid or of no legal effect.”
