Is travel time to site paid? The rule, and recording it

Travel between jobs, or from your base to a site, counts for the minimum wage; the commute from home does not. What it pays beyond that is your contract.

The rule

Gov.uk's minimum wage for different types of work page lists, among the time that counts, travelling in connection with work, including travelling from one work assignment to another, and, among the time that does not, travelling between home and work. So the minimum wage must cover the hours you spend getting from one site to the next, or from the office out to a job; it need not cover the drive from your front door to the same depot every morning.

That is the floor. Whether travel to a site a long way from home is paid at plain rate, at a travel rate, as part of the week's overtime or not at all is in your employer's agreement, and for people who work away it is usually the part of the agreement most argued about, because the hours were never written down at the time.

How Muster does it

In Muster, travel is an activity like work. You clock in on Travel, the timer runs, and the hours are in the week with the day they belong to, at the rate your agreement gives travel.

Recorded as travel, at the time you pressed. On the clock-in form, choose Travel under Doing what. A journey entered afterwards opens a journey block in the same form, so one save writes the hours and where you went. See Clocking in.
Claimed as your agreement says. As shipped, travel counts toward the 39-hour week like work and every Sunday hour is at the Sunday rate. Your settings can keep travel out of the week and claim it in its own column, and give Saturday travel a column of its own.
Through midnight, two days. A journey that crosses midnight is split between its days, each paid at that day's rate.

What Muster does not do is decide whether your travel is paid: that is the contract. It records the hours as travel, so the question is settled on the record, not from memory.

A worked example

Monday: 4 hours driving from the depot to a site, then 5 hours on site. Tuesday to Friday: 8 hours a day on site. Friday evening: 4 hours driving back.

Your agreement says	What the 8 travel hours claim
Travel counts toward the week, as shipped	The week is 45 hours: 39 at plain rate, 6 at time and a half
Travel kept out of the week, in its own column	37 hours on site at plain rate, 8 travel hours in the travel column

Try it in the demo: clock in on Travel, clock out, and see where the hours land in the week.

Questions people ask

Is my commute working time?

For the minimum wage, no: gov.uk lists travelling between home and work as time that does not count. A contract can still pay it, and some do for a site far from home. Muster records whatever you clock in as Travel; it does not decide what a commute is.

Does travel count toward the 48-hour week?

Working time for the Working Time limit is a separate rule from the minimum wage. Muster counts every hour you record, travel included, against 48 on Today, and says so when the average passes it. See The 48-hour week.

What about the miles?

Hours and miles are two claims. The drive's miles go into your mileage log with Journeys and mileage on, measured by road. See Mileage claims at HMRC's rate.

Try the demo - invented data, no account. Request a demo to use it for real. The manual has every screen.