Are business-travel and company-vehicle injuries OSHA recordable? Travel status and the commute line (1904.5(b)(6))

A regional sales rep flies to a two-day conference, checks into a hotel, and tears a knee ligament slipping in the lobby on the way to breakfast. A field technician driving the company truck from the first job site to the second is rear-ended and needs a week of restricted duty. A machine operator is hit by another car on the interstate during the ordinary morning drive to the plant. Three injuries, three vehicles or venues that "belong" to the employer in some loose sense — and only one of them is a recordable OSHA case. Guessing wrong in either direction is a problem: leave a recordable travel case off the log and you have a citable violation worth up to $16,550 per case; record a commute that never belonged there and you inflate your TRIR and DART rates with cases OSHA never wanted counted.

Travel doesn't get its own recordkeeping regime. It runs through the same three-step decision tree as every other case — did an injury occur, is it work-related, does it meet a recording criterion. What travel changes is Step 2, work-relatedness, and OSHA wrote a purpose-built subsection for it: 29 CFR 1904.5(b)(6). This post walks that rule, the "home away from home" concept that governs hotel stays, the narrow personal-detour carve-out, and the single line that decides most travel cases — the boundary between a non-recordable commute and the work-related trip.

Why the geographic presumption isn't enough for travel

For an on-site case, work-relatedness usually resolves on OSHA's geographic presumption: under 1904.5(a), an injury that occurs in the work environment is presumed work-related unless a specific exemption applies. The trouble with travel is that the "work environment" becomes a moving target. A hotel room, a rental car, an airport terminal, a customer's parking lot, a restaurant where a deal is being discussed — these drift in and out of being the work environment depending on what the employee is doing at the moment. OSHA couldn't lean on geography alone, so it replaced it with an activity test.

That test is 1904.5(b)(6). Injuries and illnesses that occur while an employee is on travel status are work-related if, at the time of the injury, the employee was engaged in work activities "in the interest of the employer." The regulation gives examples of what counts: travel to and from customer contacts, conducting job tasks, and entertaining or being entertained to transact, discuss, or promote business. That last one has a leash on it — work-related entertainment includes only entertainment engaged in at the direction of the employer, not the drinks an employee chooses to go get on their own after the client dinner ends.

The commute is the line that decides most cases

Before travel status even comes up, most injuries-in-transit are settled by a much older rule: the ordinary commute is not work-related. OSHA treats the daily trip between an employee's home and their workplace as a personal activity within the employee's own control, not something done in the interest of the employer.

Two pieces of the regulation drive this. First, one of the nine work-relatedness exemptions in 1904.5(b)(2) covers the vehicle case directly: an injury "caused by a motor vehicle accident and [that] occurs on a company parking lot or company access road while the employee is commuting to or from work" is not work-related. Second — and this is the part that catches people — OSHA has been explicit in interpretation letters that the ordinary commute is non-recordable no matter whose vehicle it happens in. In a March 2021 letter, the agency stated that "an employee's first trip of the day from home to a permanent worksite or to a customer's worksite is considered a commute," and that "the commute represents a non-work-related activity that is within the personal control of the employee."

So the machine operator hit on the interstate on the way to the plant: not recordable. It's a commute. And here is the point that trips up employers with take-home vehicles — the same answer holds if that operator is driving a company truck. The ownership of the vehicle is not the deciding factor. The first trip of the day from home to a fixed workplace is a commute whether the employee drives their own car, a company pickup, or a leased van with the logo on the door. What converts a drive into a work-related trip is not the plate on the vehicle; it's whether the driving itself is being done in the interest of the employer.

When driving is the work

Flip the machine operator into a field technician and the answer changes. A technician who leaves the first job site at 10 a.m. to drive to the second, and is rear-ended on the way, is injured while doing exactly what 1904.5(b)(6) describes — traveling to a customer contact, in the interest of the employer, in the middle of the workday. That crash is work-related. If it produces days away or restricted work, or medical treatment beyond first aid, it goes on the log.

Notice what did the work in that determination: not the fact that it happened in a vehicle, and not the fact that the employer owned it — but that the trip was a job task, mid-workday, between two work locations. That's the difference between the field tech (recordable) and the machine operator (commute). Both were driving; only one was driving in the interest of the employer at the time.

The March 2021 letter draws one more useful boundary. For an employee with no fixed workplace — someone whose day is a string of customer sites — the first trip from home to the first site is still treated as a commute, just like anyone else's. It's the trips between sites, and travel that's part of a multi-day business trip, that live inside travel status. Don't assume "field employee" means "every mile is recordable."

Business trips and the "home away from home"

Multi-day travel is where 1904.5(b)(6) does its most distinctive work, through a concept called the "home away from home." When an employee on travel status checks into a hotel, motel, or other temporary residence, OSHA treats that lodging the way it treats the employee's actual home. The regulation's instruction is direct: "You must evaluate the employee's activities after he or she checks into the hotel, motel, or other temporary residence for their work-relatedness in the same manner as you evaluate the activities of a non-traveling employee."

Translate that into a day on the road:

• Working — in the work environment. While the rep is at the conference, meeting the client, or doing job tasks, they're engaged in work in the interest of the employer. An injury then is work-related.
• Commuting between the hotel and the worksite — not work-related. Once a traveler has established a home away from home and is reporting to a fixed worksite each day, the trip between the hotel and that worksite is a commute, exactly like a home-to-work commute. OSHA confirmed in 2021 that this hotel-to-worksite trip gets "identical logic" to the ordinary commute.
• "At home" at the hotel — evaluated like a non-traveling employee at home. Slipping in the shower, tripping over luggage, an injury from the general hotel environment during personal time — judged the same way you'd judge an injury in the employee's own living room. The mere fact of being away on business doesn't make it work-related.

Return to the sales rep who tore a knee ligament slipping in the hotel lobby on the way to breakfast. That is a "home away from home" case, evaluated like a non-traveling employee at home. Walking to get personal breakfast is not a work task; a slick lobby floor is the general environment of the temporary residence, not an instrument of the work. Not recordable — the same reasoning that keeps a remote worker's trip over a home rug off the log. Had the rep instead wrenched their back lifting a box of demo equipment out of the trunk for the conference booth, that's a work task in the interest of the employer, and the answer flips to recordable.

The personal-detour carve-out — and how narrow it is

Travel status has one built-in exemption, at 1904.5(b)(6)(ii): injuries are not work-related if they occur "while the employee is on a personal detour from a reasonably direct route of travel (e.g., has taken a side trip for personal reasons)." If the traveling rep finishes the day's meetings and drives ninety minutes out of the way to visit family, an injury on that leg is off the clock and off the log.

The trap is reading "detour" too broadly. OSHA drew the line hard in a February 2015 interpretation letter. An employee flew back into Atlanta on a Saturday — a non-work day — from a business trip, stopped at a convenience store for gas, food, and a flower, then was hurt in a car accident on the way home. The employer argued travel status had ended and the stops were a personal detour. OSHA disagreed on both counts. First, "travel for work is a work-related activity even if the travel occurs on a day the employee is not scheduled to work" — the Saturday didn't matter. Second, the stops didn't break travel status, because "stopping for gas and food are normal activities involved in business travel," and the route was still "a reasonably direct route of travel to his home." The accident was recordable.

The detour exemption, OSHA explained, is for genuine personal side trips — "a vacation or sight-seeing excursion, to visit relatives, or for some other personal purpose." Grabbing gas, food, or coffee on the ordinary route is part of business travel, not an escape from it. When you're deciding whether a stop broke travel status, ask whether the employee genuinely departed the reasonable route for a personal purpose, not just whether they paused along it.

Which establishment does a traveler's case land on?

A traveling employee's recordable injury raises the same question a remote worker's does: whose 300 Log gets the entry? It's not the log of whatever city the accident happened in. Under OSHA's establishment rule (1904.30), an employee who isn't tied to one fixed location is linked to the establishment they're assigned to or report to for supervision. The field technician's crash between two job sites goes on the log of the branch that supervises them, not on a phantom log for the stretch of highway. If you keep separate logs for each establishment, fix each traveler's home establishment in advance and keep it stable — it drives which location's 300A totals, and ultimately which establishment's electronic submission, the case flows into.

Running the three openers to a verdict

• Sales rep, slipped in the hotel lobby heading to breakfast: not recordable. Home away from home, personal time, general environment of the temporary residence — evaluated like an at-home injury under 1904.5(b)(6)(i).
• Field tech, rear-ended driving between two job sites: recordable. Travel to a customer contact, in the interest of the employer, mid-workday, under 1904.5(b)(6) — then carried through the recording criteria like any other case.
• Machine operator, hit on the morning drive to the plant: not recordable. An ordinary home-to-fixed-workplace commute, non-work-related under 1904.5(b)(2) and OSHA's consistent commute interpretations — and it stays a commute even in a company vehicle.

Three cases, one rule, and the deciding question was never where or whose vehicle — it was whether the employee was doing work in the interest of the employer at the moment of the injury.

Getting the determination on paper

Travel cases are hard for the same reason telework cases are: the injury happens far from any supervisor, and the facts arrive days later and secondhand. That's exactly when a written, contemporaneous determination earns its keep. Capture what the employee was doing at the instant it happened (a work task? a commute? personal time at the hotel?), where they were in the trip (en route to a customer, between sites, on a genuine personal detour), and route those facts through 1904.5(b)(6) before anything else. A one-line note — "Not recordable — slip in hotel lobby during personal time, home-away-from-home, 1904.5(b)(6)(i)" — is what answers an auditor's question two years later without a scramble.

LogStead runs that determination for you. The recordability wizard walks the 1904.5 work-relatedness test — including the travel-status and home-away-from-home rules — and the general recording criteria in the same sequence for every case, whether it happened on your floor, in a hotel, or on the road, and records the reasoning behind each call so your determination holds up long after the trip is forgotten. It links each case to the establishment that supervises the traveler, carries the day counts into that location's 300A totals automatically, and keeps the trail audit-ready. You can walk a single travel case through the same logic right now with our free recordability checker — no account needed.