Every Journey Counts: How the Court of Cassation Changed Travel Time for Work
On November 23, 2022, the Court of Cassation handed down a ruling with major consequences for companies employing mobile workers. By reclassifying certain journeys as actual working time, it disrupts long-standing practices in many sectors. And let’s just say the news spread... like an unregistered letter.
A Judgment That Changes Everything (Well, Almost)
The case involved a mobile employee required to use a company vehicle, follow a schedule set by the employer, and remain reachable during travel. Standard, right? What’s less standard is that the Court of Cassation ruled that travel time between the employee’s home and their first or last clients of the day must be counted as actual working time.
📌 Reference to the ruling: Cass. soc. November 23, 2022, n° 20-21.924
As a reminder, until now, Article L.3121-4 of the French Labor Code clearly distinguished between “home-to-workplace travel” and “actual working time.” That’s no longer so simple. This reversal also aligns with European case law.
But What Exactly Is a Journey with “Actual” Working Time?
The Labor Code defines actual working time as a period during which the employee is at the employer’s disposal, follows their instructions, and cannot freely attend to personal matters. So, a technician on the road during the home/work journey, reachable and following a precise schedule... ticks all those boxes.
And here’s the rub: many employers continue to ignore this decision, whether out of ignorance or simple inertia. The result: they risk massive back pay claims if they have to regularize several years of non-compliant practices.
Why Did This Ruling Go Unnoticed?
Quite simply because habits die hard. Most employers still rely on the canonical version of Article L.3121-4. Yet the law evolves, and legal risk only increases.
Many companies still don’t realize that all journeys can now potentially be reclassified. And it’s not just about large corporations: SMEs and even companies with fewer than 10 employees may be affected as soon as they employ mobile technicians and fail to account for travel time from home to the intervention site.
Practically Speaking, What Are the Consequences for Employers?
Beyond the obvious need to pay overtime for these travel periods, employers must especially adopt a new approach:
- Optimize journeys to avoid unnecessary overruns,
- Rationalize scheduling by taking into account the employee’s actual starting location,
- Revise reporting models to incorporate these new criteria.
Cadulis and Travel Time: Turning a Constraint into an Opportunity
Cadulis didn’t wait for this ruling to anticipate the issue. Our platform already takes all journeys into account when calculating intervention times. And that’s not all:
- Journeys are automatically calculated from the employee’s departure address (home or depot),
- Detailed exports allow you to visualize time spent on the road,
- This data is reusable for decision-making dashboards, useful for HR as well as operational management.
The unexpected bonus? By analyzing these times, some companies are now adapting their recruitment strategy: the employee’s location becomes as important a criterion as their skills.
What Are the Risks of Ignoring This Turning Point?
Ignoring this ruling is like playing with a match over a barrel of unpaid overtime. In the event of a dispute, regularization can cover several years. For a long-serving employee or a group of field workers, the bill can quickly make a year-end bonus look like pocket change.
The Real Challenge: Changing Mindsets
The real issue isn’t technical. It’s cultural. As long as the norm is to consider journeys as a “grey area in between,” companies will continue to fly blind—at the risk of running aground on the judicial reef.
What if we finally recognized time spent on the road for what it really is? Work.
In Conclusion: Better Safe Than Sorry
This ruling marks a turning point. Not a tidal wave, but a slow and steady groundswell. Ignoring the reclassification of travel time as actual working time is taking an unnecessary risk. It is therefore urgent to:
- Comply with current law,
- Use tools that take this into account,
- Turn a constraint into a lever for operational performance.
Travel time is no longer a blind spot. It’s valuable data—if you know how to see it coming.
