Which employee journeys count as paid working time

Home-to-work travel remains outside effective working time as a rule, but the rewritten guidance now spells out when each travel situation counts. The baseline is unchanged: commuting between home and the usual workplace is not effective working timeService Public, and where a disability lengthens that commute it may attract rest compensation agreed with the employer, preferably in writing. Travel to an unusual workplace is also not effective working timeService Public, but the excess over the normal home-to-work journey gives a compensatory rest or paymentService Public whose substance is fixed by collective agreement or, absent one, directly by the employer after consulting the comité social et économique where one exists; time coinciding with normal working hours is not effective working timeService Public.

Several situations are now stated as effective working time outright. Travel time between two workplaces is effective working time. Travel during on-call periods from home to the workplace countsService Public. A staff representative's travel to employer-initiated meetings during normal working hours countsService Public, with only the excess over the normal commute counting where the travel falls outside normal hoursService Public. And where the employer requires the employee leaving home to pass through the company before reaching the job — for example to load materials into the company vehicle before going to a site — the time counts as effective working time from arrival at the companyService Public; passing through for personal convenience does not countService Public, and the same principles apply on the return.

The boundary test for the remaining cases is availability: an itinerant worker with no fixed workplace whose home-to-first-client travel is not effective working timeService Public sees it treated as such once the worker is at the employer's disposal, following its instructions and unable to attend freely to personal mattersService Public — illustrated by driving while having to fix appointments and answer calls on the company phone. Hotel-to-worksite travel on assignment is likewise effective working time only where the employee cannot freely attend to personal matters and must follow the employer's instructionsService Public.

In practice, employers count inter-site, on-call, representative-to-meeting and employer-mandated company-detour travel as effective working time, and grant the agreed rest or payment for travel beyond the normal commute to an unusual workplace.

Legal basis: code du travail articles L3121-1 (effective working time definition), L3121-4 (business travel and compensation), L3121-5 (disability-lengthened commute) and L3121-9 (on-call periods).