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What the ECJ ruled
The judgment was triggered by a Spanish landscape maintenance company. Staff had to report to a fixed depot in the morning, picked up a company vehicle and materials there and drove together to changing nature reserves. The employer counted the outward journey as working time, but not the return journey.
The EuGH/ECJ ruled that both journeys are working time within the meaning of the EU Working Time Directive. The reasoning is brief: EU law knows only two states, namely working time and rest period. There is no third category of “travel time”. Anyone who is at the business's disposal during the journey is therefore in working time.
Because this is about the interpretation of EU law, this line is binding on German courts too. That is why the judgment is relevant for your business, even though the case comes from Spain.
When does travel time count as working time? Three criteria
The EuGH/ECJ names three conditions that have to come together. The table below shows what to look at in your own journeys.
| Criterion | What that means in day-to-day work |
|---|---|
| The journey is part of the work | Without the journey there is no job, because the job site or the patient is not at the business's premises. |
| Your business sets the framework | You prescribe the meeting point, the vehicle and the departure time. |
| Employees cannot freely dispose of their time | Anyone sitting in the company van cannot deal with private matters during that time. |
If all three points are met, travel time counts as working time. Whether someone drives themselves or only rides along no longer makes any difference. Sleeping or glancing at a phone during the journey does not change the classification either.
What matters is the distinction from the private commute. Anyone driving alone to a fixed workplace in the morning is not affected. What is meant here are collective journeys organised by the business to constantly changing places of work.
Which businesses the ruling affects
The judgment hits hardest at businesses that pick up a team at the yard in the morning and send them out together. That is everyday practice in the construction industry, in commercial cleaning, in landscaping and gardening and in outpatient care.
How many people are affected can be roughly estimated. According to the Federal Statistical Office, just over 1.8 million people worked in the main construction trades and in the building cleaning trade in 2024. On top of that there are around 130,000 landscape gardeners according to figures from the German landscaping, gardening and sports ground construction association, plus roughly 450,000 employees in mobile care work. Temporary agency workers with similar collective-transport arrangements also fall into this group.
If you find your business in that list, it is worth taking a look at your morning routine. The decisive question is whether the meeting point and the departure are prescribed by the business.
Working time does not automatically mean more pay
This is the point at which many headlines go too far. In the first instance the judgment concerns working time in the sense of occupational health and safety law. That means: travel time counts towards the daily maximum working time, towards breaks and towards the statutory rest period of eleven hours.
Whether this creates an entitlement to more pay is a second question. Under the previous case law of the Federal Labour Court (Bundesarbeitsgericht, BAG), travel time may be paid at a lower rate than regular working hours, by collective agreement or by individual contract. The limit is drawn by the minimum wage: it has to be met on average across all working hours.
This is exactly where it gets expensive for businesses that have not paid for travel time at all until now. A worked example from the Berliner Zeitung makes this clear. A painter spends 80 minutes a day in the company van travelling to changing job sites and is therefore actually at the business's disposal for 8 hours and 50 minutes. Of that, 7.5 hours are paid at the minimum wage, which, spread over the actual availability, works out at only around €11.81 an hour. But the minimum wage in force since January 2026 is €13.90.
To comply with the minimum wage, the business in this example would have to pay about €18.50 more per day. Over 22 working days that adds up to around €400 a month. For a business with ten service technicians, that means a four-figure sum every month.
What is still open
How far the judgment reaches is assessed differently in the employment law world. Part of the profession sees it as a decision on the individual case that fits the previous ECJ line. Others read it as the end of the Federal Labour Court's so-called burden theory.
That theory assumed that only particularly demanding activities are necessarily working time – actively driving, for example. Merely riding along or sleeping counted more as recuperation. The EuGH/ECJ rejected this view back in 2005 and instead looks at an overall assessment of all the circumstances.
Whether the Federal Labour Court will now definitively adopt this line is open. All that is clear today is the occupational health and safety side, while the question of pay continues to depend on the contract and the collective agreement. For you that means: first of all you need reliable figures on how much travel time actually arises in your business.
How to document travel time properly
Without proper records you can neither check the maximum working time nor fend off a back claim. If travel time ends up on a scrap of paper in the glovebox, you have no basis to work from at the end of the month.
Three things are best clarified in the business first:
- Check which days your team starts from a prescribed meeting point.
- Decide who enters the travel time and at what point that happens.
- Look at your employment contract and collective agreement to see what rate is laid down there for travel time.
For the recording itself you need a tool your team can also operate on the road in the company van. That is exactly what clockin's travel time tracking is there for.
Travel time after the ECJ ruling
Every journey documented properly – outward and return
With clockin your team enters travel time in the app with one tap on the right project – for the outward journey and the return journey.
- You see per employee and per project how many hours go on journeys.
- You can tell from the reporting when travel time and work together break the ten-hour limit.
- You transfer the hours into payroll through the integrations with DATEV or Lexware Office.
What customers say
Your next step on travel time
For many businesses the judgment changes the maths in the morning. Whether more pay is due in the end depends on your contract and on the collective agreement. Either way you need reliable figures on your travel times – and you need them before anyone asks.
Record your team's travel times digitally from tomorrow and you will have the evidence for every journey to hand. You can read more on how journey times are classified in our article When does working time begin?, and on journeys during business trips in Time tracking on business trips.
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