Whether a drive is paid work depends entirely on where the trip starts and ends: commuting from home is unpaid under Ontario's Employment Standards Act, but travelling between job sites during the workday is not.
Ontario’s ESA guide sets the general test first: work is performed “when the employee is actually working or the employee is not working but is required to stay at the workplace,” and it addresses travel specifically. Two rules do the real work: “Commuting time is the time it takes an employee to get to work from home and vice-versa. This is not counted as work time for the purposes of the ESA” — but “if the employee has a usual workplace but is required to travel to another location to perform work, the time traveling to and from that other location is counted as work time.” The guide is also direct on the general point that “time spent travelling during the course of the workday is considered to be work time.”
That means the ESA requires paid travel time to be paid at least the applicable wage rate, but it does not set any specific per-kilometre mileage rate — a reimbursement rate for vehicle costs is an employer policy choice, not a statutory figure, and no province-wide number should be assumed to apply automatically to a given employer.
A service electrician starts the day driving from home directly to the first client site — that leg is unpaid commuting under the ESA. After finishing there, the crew lead reassigns them to a second site 40 minutes away to help close out a rough-in. That drive happens mid-workday between two job sites rather than from home, so it counts as work time and must be paid at least the worker’s regular or minimum wage rate for those 40 minutes. If the worker then drives straight home from the second site at day’s end, that final leg reverts to unpaid commuting — the same worker, the same vehicle, two different categories in one day depending on where each trip starts.
See also: Overtime rules on a construction crew · Automating construction payroll in Canada · ROE on a seasonal layoff.
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