What happened: The U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division has issued Opinion Letter FLSA2026-10, addressing whether a field service engineer’s pre-drive phone calls count as paid work time. The July 22, 2026 letter concludes that receiving assignment pages is not compensable, since it is incidental to commuting in an employer-provided vehicle, but calling clients and other engineers to schedule appointments is compensable, because that work is “integral and indispensable” to the job and can strip the following drive of its ordinary, unpaid commute status.

Why it matters: The letter lands on the fault line employers have navigated since field-based and remote work became the default for large parts of the workforce: where does the paid workday actually start when an employee is never in an office. DOL applies a “primary beneficiary” test to the totality of the circumstances, meaning the same commute can be paid or unpaid depending on what the worker is asked to do during it. For any employer with field service, sales, or home health staff who make calls before their first stop, this changes what belongs on a timesheet now, not after a future audit.

The insight: The letter hands HR and legal teams a bright-line test they can operationalize immediately: if a policy or manager expectation requires substantive work before or during the drive, that drive time is exposed to a wage claim, regardless of how the job description labels it. Employers that treat “get your assignments and go” as unpaid should audit whether dispatchers calling drivers mid-commute, or managers expecting confirmation calls before the first stop, has drifted into the compensable category DOL just described. That audit is cheaper now than after a collective action makes the same distinction for them, especially with courts already testing this year how much discretion employers retain once a legal standard meets the specific facts and regulators abroad pushing employers toward guaranteeing more predictable, compensated working time.

Source: U.S. Department of Labor