If your business operates a mobile workforce – care workers visiting clients, agricultural staff on zero-hours contracts, contractors dispatched to different sites each day – a Court of Appeal ruling handed down last year has direct implications for how you approach National Minimum Wage compliance.
HMRC v Taylors Services Ltd [2025] EWCA Civ 956 took five years and three courts to resolve. The conclusion of all this was that workers travelling from their homes to a place of work are not entitled to be paid the National Minimum Wage for that travel time.
- Even if the journey lasts up to eight hours
- Even if the employer provides the transport
- Even if there is no practical alternative way for workers to get there.
That outcome may feel counterintuitive. Understanding why the courts reached it, and what it means for your payroll, requires a closer look at both the facts and the law.
What the case involved
Taylors Services Ltd employed workers on zero-hour contracts to service poultry farms across the country. The work involved injecting, grading, loading and unloading birds at sites that were sometimes many hours from workers’ homes. The company provided minibus transport, collecting workers directly from their homes
and taking them to whichever farm they had been assigned that day.
Workers were paid £2.50 per hour for the travel time. The relevant NMW rate at the time was significantly higher.
In 2020, HMRC inspected the arrangement and concluded that the travel time should be paid at NMW. It issued underpayment notices totalling around £62,000 in wage arrears, plus additional penalties. Taylors appealed.
The Employment Tribunal sided with HMRC. The Employment Appeal Tribunal sided with Taylors. HMRC appealed to the Court of Appeal, which upheld the EAT’s decision and dismissed HMRC’s case.
What the law says
The NMW Regulations 2015 categorise workers in different ways. Most hourly-paid workers are classified as doing “time work” – they are paid for the hours they put in. What counts as working time for these workers is defined in Regulations 30 to 35.
The central tension in Taylors was between two specific provisions.
Regulation 30 defines time work broadly – any period when a worker is at work and required to be there. Regulation 34 carves out an exception – time spent travelling between a worker’s home and their place of work does not count as time work, and therefore does not attract NMW entitlement.
HMRC’s argument was that these workers were under the employer’s control during the journey – they were required to be on the minibus and had no independent means of getting to the farm – and that the travel time should therefore be treated as working time.
The Court of Appeal disagreed. Lord Justice Underhill was clear – the workers were not performing any of the tasks they were employed to do during the journey. They were free to use the time as they chose, subject only to the constraint of being in the back of a minibus. That is not “actual work.” And even if you could argue otherwise, Regulation 34’s exclusion for home-to-work travel would still apply.
The distinction matters – travel between assignments during the working day is working time and must be paid at NMW. The exclusion applies specifically to the home-to-work leg, not to travel in general.
What this means in practice
For employers with mobile workforces
The ruling gives businesses operating mobile workforces some clarity on where the NMW line sits. The home-to-work exclusion is confirmed as real and robust, and applies regardless of journey length or whether the employer provides transport.
A few specific points to note.
The duration of the journey is not relevant. Whether it is a 20-minute drive or a four-hour trek, the exclusion applies in the same way.
Providing transport does not affect the position. Whether workers make their own way to site or travel in an employer-provided vehicle, the legal treatment of home-to-work travel remains the same.
The worker category matters. The ruling is specific to “time workers” – those paid by the hour. Workers classified as doing “unmeasured work” sit in a different position under the Regulations, and it is worth taking advice on that separately if it is relevant to your workforce.
Between-assignment travel is different. Once workers are travelling from one job to the next during their working day, that time is working time and must be paid at NMW. The two should not be conflated.
The wider context
The Court of Appeal was careful to acknowledge that the outcome can feel uncomfortable. Workers spending significant portions of their day travelling for work – for pay well below NMW – and the law as currently drafted does not require more. The Court noted that any anomaly in the Regulations is a matter for the
Low Pay Commission or the Secretary of State to address through legislative change, not for the judiciary to correct.
That context is worth keeping in mind. The legal position may shift if the Regulations are amended. Compliance today does not guarantee the same position tomorrow.
What is also clear is that scrutiny of low-pay arrangements is increasing. The Fair Work Agency, which launched in April 2026 and took over NMW enforcement from HMRC, has new powers to bring Employment Tribunal claims directly. The NMW rate itself has also risen – the National Living Wage increased to £12.71 per
hour from 1 April 2026, and the 18–20 rate went up to £10.85.
Questions worth asking right now
The Taylors ruling provides reassurance, but it is not a compliance strategy on its own. The line between home-to-work travel and between-assignment travel is clear in principle; for workers without fixed locations, on variable hours, travelling to multiple sites in a single day, it is rarely straightforward to
apply in practice.
On worker classification
- Do you know whether your workers are classified as time workers, salaried hours workers, output workers or unmeasured workers? The category determines which rules apply.
- If you have workers who might fall into the unmeasured work category, have you taken advice on how that affects your NMW obligations?
On how travel is treated
- Have you mapped each leg of travel your workers undertake – home to first site, between sites during the day, last site to home? Each leg has a different treatment under the Regulations.
- Are you confident that between-assignment travel is being identified correctly and paid at NMW?
On documentation and readiness
- Do you have a clear record of how you have thought through NMW compliance for your mobile workforce?
With the Fair Work Agency now operational and NMW rates having risen significantly, are any workers sitting close to the minimum who need to be reviewed?
If the answer to any of these is uncertain, it is worth finding out before an enforcement visit prompts the question for you.
NMW compliance for mobile workforces is one of the more complex areas of payroll. Having the right support – people who understand the Regulations and can apply them to the practical reality of how your workforce operates – makes a material difference to getting it right.
