DRIVING BETWEEN JOB SITES ON YOUR LUNCH BREAK? THAT MAY BE PAID TIME
You clock out for a meal break, but your employer asks you to drive from one job site to another during that same window. By the time you park and actually sit down to eat, fifteen or twenty minutes of the break are gone, and nobody has adjusted your pay or your break schedule to account for it.
This gets treated as a scheduling inconvenience more often than it gets treated as a pay question, mostly because the drive itself feels like a normal part of the job rather than something separate from the meal period.
California’s meal-period framework, set out in Brinker Restaurant Corp. v. Superior Court (2012) 53 Cal.4th 1004, requires an employer to relieve an employee of all duty for a full thirty minutes, free to leave the work site, in order for that period to count as an unpaid meal break at all.
Travel time the employer directs during that window is not automatically excluded from that duty-free requirement just because it also happens to move you toward your next assignment. If the drive is at the employer’s direction and cuts into the thirty minutes, the meal period may not have been provided the way Brinker requires, which can trigger a separate premium in addition to your regular wages for that day.
How much of that drive time actually counts, and whether a premium is owed, depends on who directed the travel, how the break was scheduled around it, and what your actual duty-free time looked like that day.
A meal period that gets interrupted by directed travel is not automatically fixed just because you eventually got a break of some length that day. Whether the specific pattern at your job crosses the line is worth walking through with the actual facts.
Contact Michael Trust Law, APC for a no-charge initial consultation. The facts determine whether you have a claim – and how much of a conversation that takes.
This post shares general information based on common patterns I see in California workplaces. It is not legal advice, does not create an attorney- client relationship, and outcomes depend on specific facts – no lawyer can guarantee a result. Past results do not guarantee or predict future outcomes. AI may have been used to create this post. All content reviewed by a CA attorney before publication.