Travel Math

If Sally travels from point A to point B on a train for 3 hours and Theo travels from point B to point C on a plane for 4 hours but stops to eat in the terminal for half an hour…

No, this isn't your high school math class. This brainteaser is courtesy of the government's complex rules on compensatory time off for travel. The new time-off regulations came in response to provisions in the 2004 Federal Workforce Flexibility Act, and they went into effect in January 2005.

To aid in solving this regulation-cum-algorithm, the Office of Personnel Management recently released a new fact sheet clarifying the rules. Here are some basics:

• Comp time for travel is time spent for travel that is not otherwise compensable. If, for example, you travel during work hours, it's considered to be otherwise compensable by your regular pay, and thus not eligible.
• Comp time for travel can never be used if the employee is eligible for overtime. Even if an employee exceeds the biweekly premium pay cap with a large number of overtime hours, the employee is not eligible for travel comp time because it still is considered to be otherwise compensable.
• Time spent eating meals is not eligible for comp time. That includes meals taken at an airport while waiting for a flight. OPM considers this to be time that you would have spent eating a meal elsewhere, and so does not compensate for it.
• Regular commuting time is deducted from travel comp time. If you travel to an airport from your home in the morning, you must deduct the amount of time you normally use to commute to work. The exception is if you travel from work to an airport, for example; that time is considered compensable.
• Employees and agencies need to keep track of comp time in either 6-minute or 15-minute increments.
• No cash payment will be made for travel comp time, but there is no limit on the amount of compensatory time off that you can take.
• If a waiting period is so long that it allows employees to sleep, rest or "otherwise use the time for his or her own purposes," such as an overnight delay for a flight, that time cannot be counted toward comp time.

Confused yet? Here's a sample, provided by OPM, of a travel scenario with creditable and noncreditable comp times.

In total, this employee had 13 hours of travel, four and a half of which were during regular working hours, two of which were traveling to or from home, and a half-hour spent eating. That leaves the employee with six compensable travel hours.