The starting point for every travel-time question in this chapter is the commute itself: an employee who travels from home before the regular workday and returns home at its end is engaged in ordinary home-to-work travel, and that travel is a normal incident of employment rather than work. This holds whether the employee reports to one fixed location every day or to a different job site each morning — the destination does not matter, only the fact that the trip is the ordinary journey between home and the day's first or last work location. Ordinary commuting is not counted as hours worked even if the employer voluntarily agrees to pay for it; paying for a commute as a courtesy does not make it count as hours worked under the Act.

This baseline exists because the Portal-to-Portal Act is a federal law that relieves an employer of liability for the minimum wage or overtime on time spent walking, riding, or traveling to and from the place where an employee's principal activities — the activity or activities the employee is employed to perform — begin or end on a given workday. Some travel time that used to count as work under the Fair Labor Standards Act itself — underground travel in mines, or walking from a time clock to a workbench — was pulled outside hours worked by the Portal-to-Portal Act, unless the employer's own contract, custom, or practice still treats it as compensable. That same unpaid-by-default starting point carries through the rest of this chapter: every other travel rule here identifies a specific circumstance where the trip stops being ordinary commuting and starts being part of the job.

Once the workday has actually begun, that default flips. Time spent traveling from job site to job site is part of the principal activity itself and must be counted as hours worked. The same is true where an employee has to report to a meeting place to pick up instructions or tools before heading to the actual work site — the travel from that meeting place to the work location is part of the day's work, and it counts regardless of what any contract, custom, or practice says. Only the trip home at the end of the day, or the trip from home at the start, keeps its unpaid commute character; travel the employee is required to do in between is on the clock.