What Is Considered a Commute: IRS and FLSA Rules

A commute, in the eyes of both the IRS and federal labor law, is the trip between your home and your regular workplace, and what is considered a commute is treated as personal time: you can’t deduct it on your taxes and your employer generally doesn’t have to pay you for it. The line moves, though, once you add a temporary job site, a qualifying home office, or a second work stop during the day. Where you land on that line decides whether you’re absorbing the cost yourself or recovering it.

How the IRS Draws the Line

The IRS treats the daily trip from home to your regular workplace as a personal expense, on par with groceries or rent. Gas, tolls, transit fares, and parking tied to that trip are not deductible on your federal return.¹ Distance and mode don’t change this. A 90-minute highway drive and a 10-minute subway ride are treated the same way.

Everything is anchored to your “tax home,” which is the city or general area where your main place of business sits, not necessarily where you sleep. Any trip from your residence to a regular work location inside that tax home is a commute. Taking business calls during the drive, hauling work equipment in the trunk, or carrying your company’s logo on the car does not turn the trip into business travel.¹

When a Trip Stops Being a Commute for Tax Purposes

Several situations move a trip out of the commuting box and into deductible business travel. These distinctions matter most for people who report business income; W-2 employees face a separate limitation covered further down.

Temporary Work Locations

A work assignment realistically expected to last one year or less counts as a temporary work location. If you have a regular office and your employer sends you to a temporary site in the same trade or business, daily transportation to that site is business travel rather than commuting, regardless of distance.¹ Once an assignment is expected to run longer than a year, the site becomes a new regular workplace and the trips revert to commuting.

A Qualifying Home Office

If your home office qualifies as your principal place of business, every trip from home to another work location in the same trade or business is deductible business travel. This applies whether the destination is temporary or permanent, and regardless of distance.¹ A freelance consultant who works from a home office and drives to a client’s site is making a business trip, not commuting.

Travel Between Work Sites

Your commute ends when you arrive at your first work destination of the day. Travel from there to a second or third work location is business travel and its cost is deductible as a transportation expense.¹ The final trip from your last work site back home reverts to a non-deductible commute.

Who Can Actually Deduct Business Travel in 2026

Even when a trip clearly qualifies as business travel, not everyone can claim it. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act eliminated the deduction for unreimbursed employee business expenses starting in 2018. That provision was originally set to expire after the 2025 tax year, but Congress made it permanent in 2025.²

W-2 employees cannot deduct work-related travel costs on their personal tax returns. Not mileage between job sites, not trips to temporary assignments, nothing. The deduction survives only for self-employed individuals and independent contractors who report business income on Schedule C. If you’re an employee and your employer doesn’t reimburse your work travel, you absorb that cost.

For self-employed taxpayers, the 2026 standard mileage rate for business driving is 72.5 cents per mile.³ You can use this flat rate instead of tracking actual gas, maintenance, and depreciation. Business-related parking and tolls are deductible on top of the mileage rate, but parking at your principal place of business remains a non-deductible commuting cost.¹

Pre-Tax Commuter Benefits for Employees

With the deduction closed off, employer-provided transportation benefits are the main source of tax relief for the daily trip to work. Under IRC Section 132(f), employers can offer qualified transportation fringe benefits that are excluded from taxable income. The 2026 monthly caps are:

Up to $340 per month for combined commuter highway vehicle transportation and transit passes.
Up to $340 per month for qualified parking at or near the workplace, or at a location from which the employee commutes by transit or carpool.

These limits apply per employee per month, and the benefit is tax-free for both the employer and the employee up to those caps.⁴ If your employer runs a commuter benefits program, enrolling lets you cover commuting costs with pre-tax dollars.

Does Your Employer Have to Pay You for the Commute?

The tax question and the wage question run on separate tracks. Federal regulations are blunt: traveling from home before the regular workday and returning at the end of it is ordinary home-to-work travel, and it is not work time.⁵ That’s true whether you report to the same office every day or rotate between job sites.

The legal foundation is the Portal-to-Portal Act, which shields employers from wage liability for travel to and from the place where you perform your main duties and for activities preliminary or follow-up to those duties.⁶ For pay purposes, your workday starts when you begin your principal duties, not when you back out of the driveway.

Company Vehicles

Driving an employer-provided vehicle home does not automatically make the commute paid time. The Portal-to-Portal Act treats commuting in a company vehicle as non-work activity when two conditions are met: the travel is within the employer’s normal commuting area, and the arrangement is covered by an agreement between the employer and the employee or their representative.⁶ The Department of Labor takes the same position.⁷

Contracts and Custom Can Override the Default

A written contract, collective bargaining agreement, or established workplace custom that treats commuting time as paid controls over the federal default.⁶ Union contracts in construction and transportation trades often include travel-time pay provisions that go beyond what federal law requires. If your contract says the commute is compensable, that’s what governs.

Travel That Does Count as Paid Work Time

Some trips that look like commutes must be paid under federal law.

Site-to-Site Travel

Once the workday has started, travel between job sites during that day is work time. The Department of Labor calls this “travel that is all in a day’s work” and requires it to be counted as hours worked.⁸ A home health aide driving from one patient’s house to the next, or an electrician moving between construction sites, is working during those drives.

Special One-Day Assignments

If you normally work at a fixed location and your employer sends you on a one-day assignment in another city, the travel time to and from that city is compensable. The employer can subtract the time you would have spent on your normal commute; the rest is hours worked.⁹ If your usual commute is 30 minutes each way and the assignment involves two hours of travel each way, you’re owed for the extra three hours of travel that day.

Overnight Travel

Travel that keeps you away from home overnight follows its own rule. When that travel cuts across your normal working hours, it is compensable work time, on both working days and non-working days. If you normally work 9 to 5 on weekdays and you spend Saturday afternoon on a flight for a Monday meeting, the 9 to 5 window on Saturday counts as work time. Time spent traveling outside your regular working hours as a passenger generally does not.⁸

Commutes and Workers’ Compensation

Workers’ compensation applies its own framework. Under the coming and going rule, injuries during a normal commute are generally not covered because the trip falls outside the course and scope of employment. A car accident on the highway heading to the office is a risk shared with every other driver, not a workplace hazard.

Most jurisdictions draw the line at the employer’s premises. Step onto property your employer controls, including a company-owned parking lot, and you’ve crossed from commute into employment. An injury in that lot is typically a workers’ compensation claim; an injury on the public street moments earlier is not.

Exceptions That Extend Coverage

Courts have carved out several situations where an injury during commute-like travel is still covered:

Special errand. If your employer asks you to handle a task on the way to or from work, the trip takes on a work character and an injury during that detour is generally compensable.
Dual-purpose trip. When a trip serves both a personal and a business purpose, the key question is whether the business purpose alone would have justified the travel. If it would have, an injury during the trip can fall within the scope of employment.
Employer-provided transportation. In some jurisdictions, if the employer furnishes the vehicle or pays for the transportation, the commute itself is treated as a benefit of employment and injuries during it may be covered.
Traveling employees. Workers with no fixed workplace whose travel is a fundamental part of the job, such as sales representatives, delivery drivers, and traveling nurses, are often considered within the course of employment from the moment they leave home.

These exceptions vary significantly by state. Workers’ compensation is state law, and the same set of facts can produce opposite outcomes depending on the jurisdiction. If you’re injured on a trip that straddles the line, the specifics of your state’s rules will matter more than the general framework.

State Mileage Reimbursement Requirements

Federal law does not require employers to reimburse employees for using a personal vehicle on work-related trips. A handful of states, including California, Illinois, and Massachusetts, do require private employers to reimburse necessary business expenses, including mileage. In every other state, reimbursement is optional unless failing to reimburse would push the employee’s effective pay below the federal minimum wage. When employers do reimburse, most use the IRS standard rate, 72.5 cents per mile for 2026, as the benchmark.³

For most W-2 employees who drive between work sites, the only route to recovering those costs is employer reimbursement or a qualified transportation benefit. Without a voluntary policy or a state mandate, the money comes out of pocket with no tax deduction to fall back on.

1
Internal Revenue Service. Publication 463 (2025), Travel, Gift, and Car Expenses
2
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 U.S. Code 67 – 2-Percent Floor on Miscellaneous Itemized Deductions
3
Internal Revenue Service. IRS Sets 2026 Business Standard Mileage Rate at 72.5 Cents Per Mile, Up 2.5 Cents
4
Internal Revenue Service. Publication 15-B (2026), Employer’s Tax Guide to Fringe Benefits
5
eCFR. 29 CFR 785.35 – Home to Work; Ordinary Situation
6
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 29 U.S. Code 254 – Relief From Liability and Punishment Under the Fair Labor Standards Act
7
U.S. Department of Labor. Travel Time
8
U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet #22: Hours Worked Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)
9
eCFR. 29 CFR 785.37 – Home to Work on Special One-Day Assignment in Another City