Are You Overpaying for Travel Time Between Job Sites?

For contractors whose crews hit several sites in a day — maintenance routes, service calls, multi-property work — one question quietly determines your labor cost: are you paying only for time on site, or also for all the driving in between?

The rules around compensable travel time can be genuinely complex, and this isn't legal advice on what you owe. But there's a simpler, purely practical problem underneath it: if your records can't distinguish on-site time from transit time, you can't manage the cost either way.

Why multi-site days blur the numbers

When a worker checks in once in the morning and out at the end of the day, everything in between counts the same — the four hours actually working and the ninety minutes spent driving between five stops. If you're only supposed to pay for on-site time, that single-punch day is overpaying you into the numbers, and you can't even see by how much.

The blur cuts both ways. You might be overpaying for transit you didn't intend to cover, or you might be underpaying and exposing yourself to a wage dispute — and with muddy records, you can't tell which.

Per-site check-ins make the line visible

The fix is to record each stop separately. When a worker checks in and out at each individual site, you get the actual on-site time at each one — 40 minutes at Oak Street, 25 at Church Street — with the gaps in between clearly identifiable as transit.

Now the picture is clean. You can see exactly how much of the day was billable on-site work versus travel, attribute the on-site hours to the right job for costing, and make deliberate decisions about travel-time pay instead of absorbing it blindly. The report shows on-site time per site per day, so nothing hides in a single daily total.

Why this matters more as you grow

A one-site-a-day crew barely feels this. A maintenance operation running five stops per worker feels it enormously — the transit time across a whole crew, every day, is a major cost that's completely invisible without per-site records. The more your crews move, the more the single-punch day costs you in numbers you can't see.

The bottom line

If your crews work multiple sites a day, single daily check-ins hide your real labor cost inside a blur of driving and working. Per-site check-in and check-out draws the line clearly — so you pay for on-site work on purpose, not by accident, and always know exactly where the hours went.

This article addresses record-keeping, not wage-and-hour law. Consult an employment attorney about travel-time pay obligations for your situation. CrewVerify records a check-in and check-out at every site, so on-site time and transit are never blurred into one number. Start a free trial.