If your staff go from home to a client, then to another client, then home - cleaners, carers, mobile maintenance, engineers - then a 2015 judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union changed how their day has to be counted, and a lot of rotas never caught up.
What the Court decided
The case is Federación de Servicios Privados del sindicato Comisiones Obreras v Tyco Integrated Security (C-266/14), decided in September 2015. Tyco's technicians installed and maintained security systems at customer premises. The company had closed its regional offices, so the technicians had no fixed base: they drove from home to the first customer of the day and home from the last.
Tyco treated that first and last journey as rest. The Court disagreed.
Where workers have no fixed or habitual place of work, the time spent travelling between home and the first and last customers designated by the employer is working time within the meaning of the Working Time Directive.
The reasoning is worth knowing, because it tells you where the boundary sits. The Court looked at whether the worker was at the employer's disposal and carrying out duties - and concluded that when the employer decides the list of customers and their order, the worker is not free to use that time as their own. The journeys are a necessary means of providing the service.
The part everybody gets wrong
This is about working time, not pay.
The Court was explicit that the Directive does not govern remuneration. Whether those journeys are paid, and at what rate, remains a matter for national law, collective agreement or contract. A great many summaries of this case say employers must now pay for travel. That is not what it holds, and in some member states it is not the outcome.
What it does change is the clock. Once travel counts as working time, it counts for:
- The maximum average weekly working time (48 hours, averaged over the reference period)
- Daily rest - the uninterrupted rest between finishing and starting again
- Weekly rest
- Night work limits, where they apply
- Rest breaks during the working day
So a carer whose visits total six hours but whose day runs from 07:00 to 19:00 with travel in between is not a six-hour day for these purposes. That is the practical consequence, and it is a scheduling problem long before it is a payroll one.
Who it applies to, and who it does not
The judgment turns on having no fixed or habitual place of work. That is a real limit, not a formality.
- A carer or cleaner who is assigned directly to client addresses, with no base to attend - squarely covered.
- Someone who reports to a depot, branch or office first and travels from there - their commute to the depot is the ordinary commute, and it is treated differently. Travel between assignments during the day was already working time in any event.
- Someone with a fixed site who occasionally travels elsewhere - different again, and the ordinary commute analysis applies.
The awkward cases are in between, and they are common: a nominal base that nobody actually attends, or staff who collect keys and materials from a unit some mornings and not others. The test the Court applied is whether the employer determines what the worker does with the time.
What this means for the rota
Three consequences that are entirely practical.
The order of the visits changes the working time. If the first call is the one furthest from home and the last is the one nearest, the day is shorter in working-time terms than the reverse. Route order was already an efficiency question. It is now also a compliance one, and the two point the same way.
The daily rest calculation starts and ends at the wrong place in most systems. If your records show a carer's day as 08:00 to 17:30 based on first and last visit, but travel puts it at 07:20 to 18:10, the gap to tomorrow's start is fifty minutes shorter than it appears. Where daily rest is tight, this is exactly where it fails.
Travel has to be recorded, not estimated. A rota with visit times and no travel between them cannot demonstrate the working day at all, and reconstructing it afterwards from mileage or memory is not a record.
Where to check
This is EU-level, so the obligation exists in all seven of the markets covered on this blog, but each country implements the Working Time Directive through its own law, and each has its own position on whether that travel is remunerated and how it interacts with collective agreements. Some sectors - domiciliary care in particular - have specific national rules layered on top.
The judgment itself is short and readable, and is the right starting point rather than any summary of it: Case C-266/14, available on EUR-Lex.
What to do this month
- Identify who genuinely has no fixed workplace. Not who has a base on paper - who attends one.
- Check whether their recorded working day includes the first and last journeys. In most systems it does not.
- Re-run daily rest against the corrected day. This is where the surprises are.
- Look at route order for anyone whose day is close to a limit, because it is the cheapest lever you have.
- Take advice on the pay question separately, in your own jurisdiction. It is a different question with a different answer, and it does not follow automatically from the working-time one.