Labor hours, overtime, and per diem field guide for traveling crews

Your own hours record, and why the company's is not enough

Your hours record is the daily account you keep of your own time: when you started, when you stopped, the breaks, the overtime, the cost code, the job number, and the per diem you were owed. It sits beside the company's record, not inside it. The official payroll runs through a foreman's count, a timekeeper's entry, a clock that may or may not have caught your badge, and a payroll clerk three states away. Every one of those steps is a place a day, an hour, or a per diem can fall out.

Nobody hands you back a day you cannot prove. The traveler who works a hundred hours in a two-week stretch, on a job that ramps and slips, is exactly the worker who gets shorted, because the volume hides the error and the distance makes it hard to chase. The fix is not trust. It is a second record, kept by the only person who knows for certain what time you actually worked.

The same record does double duty for the contractor. When the labor on a delay or a change gets challenged, the question is whether the hours were real, and the answer is the contemporaneous log, not a memory. A clean worker record rolls up into a clean force-account claim. This guide is how to keep that record so it pays you right today and stands up when somebody disputes the labor later.

The workday record: start, stop, breaks, cost code, job number

Log the day while it is fresh, not at the end of the week. A workday record that you reconstruct on Friday from memory is the one that loses the Tuesday you skipped lunch to finish a pull. Write down the start time, the stop time, every unpaid break, the cost code or area you worked, and the job number, the day it happens.

Start and stop are the easy part. The breaks are where the money moves, because an unpaid meal that you actually worked through is unpaid time you will not see again unless you noted it. If you clocked out for thirty minutes and the foreman pulled you back to the floor, that is worked time, and the only proof is your note with the time on it.

Tie every entry to a cost code or area and a job number. On a big data center job there are dozens of cost codes, and your hours get distributed across them with or without your input. Tag them yourself and two things get easier: the job costing is real, and if your hours ever get questioned you can point to where the work was. The number that gets forgotten is the job number itself when a crew floats between a base contract and a change. Note which one you were on, by the hour if it shifts.

How do daily and weekly overtime differ?

Weekly overtime is time and a half for hours over 40 in a workweek, and that is the federal floor under the Fair Labor Standards Act, the FLSA. It is hours over 40, full stop. You can work 12 hours Monday and 4 hours Tuesday, and under federal law alone none of it is overtime until the week passes 40.

Daily overtime is different, and it is where the FLSA stops and state law takes over. Some states pay overtime for hours over 8 in a single day, regardless of the weekly total. California is the clearest case: over 8 hours in a day is time and a half, and the daily and weekly rules both apply, with the more favorable one winning. Most states do not have daily overtime at all and ride the federal 40-hour rule. A few have their own thresholds. This is the part that varies the most, so the rule that applies to you depends on the state you are physically working in and, if you are union, the collective bargaining agreement, the CBA.

On a traveling job this matters because you cross into the rules of wherever the job sits, not the rules of home. A crew that travels from a no-daily-OT state into California is owed daily overtime for the California hours, and a crew going the other way loses it. Do not assume the rule from your last job follows you. Confirm the state and the CBA for the job you are standing on, and when the two disagree, the one that pays the worker more generally governs.

Double time and the seventh-day rule

Double time is two times the regular rate, and it is far less common than time and a half. Federal law does not require double time at all. Where it shows up, it comes from state law or, more often on a union job, from the CBA. California is the one state with a daily double-time rule in its labor code: over 12 hours in a day, and over 8 hours on the seventh consecutive day in a workweek, are paid at double time.

The seventh-day rule is the one travelers run into on a hard push. Work seven days straight in the same workweek and the seventh day can carry a premium: in California, time and a half for the first 8 hours and double time after that. Many CBAs write their own version, often Saturday at time and a half and Sunday at double time, or double time after a set number of hours. The agreement controls, and it can be richer than any state law.

Track the consecutive days, not just the hours, because the seventh-day premium turns on the calendar as much as the clock. If your record shows six days and payroll shows seven, or the workweek boundary got drawn to break up your streak, that is a premium you can lose quietly. Write the date and the day number on every entry during a stretch of long days.

What is prevailing wage and certified payroll?

Prevailing wage is a minimum wage and fringe rate set by the government for work on public or publicly funded construction, by classification and by locality. On federal and federally funded work it comes from the Davis-Bacon Act and the related acts, which require contractors to pay not less than the prevailing wage plus fringe benefits predetermined by the Department of Labor for each trade classification on the job. States have their own prevailing wage laws, sometimes called little Davis-Bacon acts, for state-funded work.

Certified payroll is the weekly report that proves it was paid. On Davis-Bacon work the contractor files a weekly certified payroll, commonly on Form WH-347, listing each worker, their classification, their hours, the rate paid, and the fringe, with a signed statement of compliance under the Copeland Act swearing the payroll is accurate and everyone got at least the required rate. That statement carries real weight, because a false certification is its own violation.

Data center work pulls this in more than people expect. A purely private hyperscale build may not be covered, but the substation, the utility tie-in, the public road and water work, or a project carrying public financing or tax incentives can trigger prevailing wage on part or all of the scope. Whether a given job is covered depends on the funding and the contract, so confirm it against the project documents and the wage determination posted for the job. When you are on a prevailing wage job, your own record of hours by classification is how you check the certified payroll, because the fringe and the classification are exactly where a worker gets shorted.

Per diem, lodging, and M&IE

Per diem is a daily allowance to cover the cost of being away from home on the job: a place to sleep and food to eat. It splits into two parts. Lodging is the room. M&IE is meals and incidental expenses, which folds in tips and the small stuff so you are not chasing receipts for a coffee. Many employers pay a single flat daily number that bundles both, and some pay lodging against actual cost and a fixed M&IE on top.

The reference point most employers anchor to is the GSA per diem rate, the schedule the federal government publishes for travel. For fiscal year 2026 the standard rate for most of the country runs about 178 dollars a day, split roughly 110 for lodging and 68 for M&IE, with higher rates set for hundreds of high-cost localities. Those rates change every fiscal year and by location, so the data center out in a cheap county and the one near a major metro carry different numbers. Confirm the current rate for the actual job location, not a figure from a job two years ago.

A detail worth knowing: under the federal rules, the first and last travel day are commonly paid at 75 percent of the M&IE rate, not the full day, because you were not out for the whole day. Your employer's policy is what actually governs what you get, and a CBA can set a subsistence or per diem figure of its own. Read the policy or the agreement so you know the number you are owed before you start checking the stub against it.

Is your per diem taxable?

Per diem paid under an accountable plan, at or below the federal rate, is generally not taxable to the worker and does not show up as wages. That is the whole point of the structure. The catch is the accountable plan: the IRS rules, in Publication 463 and the per diem revenue procedures, require that the payment be for real business travel away from your tax home, that it be substantiated, and that any excess be returned. Pay it that way and it stays tax-free.

Cross the line and it becomes taxable wages. If the employer pays above the federal rate, the overage is generally treated as taxable income subject to withholding. If there is no accountable plan, or the per diem is really just extra pay dressed up to dodge tax, the IRS can treat the whole amount as wages. There is also an overtime trap: a per diem that is not a genuine reimbursement can be ruled part of your regular rate, which actually raises the overtime you are owed.

This is the section to hedge hard, because it is tax law and it turns on how your specific employer set up the plan. The general shape above is reliable. The application to your paycheck is not something to take from a field guide. If your per diem is showing up as taxable when you think it should not, or you are working far enough from home that your tax home is in question, take the actual pay records to a tax professional. Do not guess on this one.

Show-up pay and the rained-out day

Show-up pay, also called reporting time pay, is the minimum you get when you report for a shift and the work is not there. You drove in, you stood by, and the job got called on account of weather or a missing permit or gear that never showed. Some states require the employer to pay a portion of the shift anyway. California requires reporting time pay, generally half the scheduled shift with a floor and a ceiling on hours, for non-exempt workers covered by a wage order.

Most states do not require show-up pay at all, so on a traveling job it again comes down to the state and the CBA. Many union agreements write their own reporting and show-up language, often two hours or four hours of pay for reporting to a job that gets sent home, and that contract language frequently beats whatever the state requires.

The rained-out day is the common case on a data center job with a lot of outdoor and yard work. If you showed up, log it: the time you arrived, the time you were released, and that the job was called. That note is what turns a wasted morning into a paid one, and it is the first thing that gets left out because nobody worked, so nobody wrote anything down.

Cost coding your hours and the change-order labor

Every hour you work lands on a cost code, the budget line the contractor uses to track where the money and the labor go. If you do not tag your hours, somebody else guesses, and the guess is usually whatever code is easiest, not where you actually were. Tag them yourself by area and code as you log the day, and the job costing reflects reality instead of a Friday estimate.

The place this earns its keep is the change order. When the scope changes and the contractor has to prove the added labor to get paid for it, the proof is hours coded to the changed work, captured as it happened. Base-contract hours and change hours have to be kept apart, by the hour, on the day. Lump them together and the change-order labor becomes an argument instead of a record, and arguments lose money. The takeoff and the change-order side of this is its own discipline, covered in the field change order takeoff guide.

On a fast-moving job a crew can swing between the base scope and two different change items in one shift. The honest move is to note the switch at the time, even roughly, so the day breaks down into the codes you actually worked. A worker who can show three hours on the base and five on a documented change is the worker whose hours hold up when the change-order labor gets scrutinized.

What do I do if my paycheck is short?

Reconcile every stub against your own record the day it lands, not at the end of the job. Lay the pay stub next to your daily log and check it line by line: total hours, the split between straight time, overtime, and double time, the rate on each, the per diem, and that no day is missing. The errors cluster in a few places, and they are the same ones every time.

The missed overtime is the most common. The hours total looks right, but the overtime got paid at straight time, or the daily overtime in a daily-OT state never got applied. Then there is the wrong rate, where a classification change or a raise did not flow through. The short per diem, where you got paid for five days out and were really out six, or the rate was the old locality. And the missing day, where a whole shift, often a Saturday or a rained-out report, just is not there.

When the stub is short, raise it in writing and fast. A verbal mention to a foreman who is buried evaporates. Put the discrepancy in writing to payroll or the timekeeper with your record attached: the date, the hours, the code, what you were paid, and what you are owed. Keep a copy. A short check caught and documented in the same week is a correction. The same short check found at the end of a six-month job, with no contemporaneous record, is a fight you are likely to lose.

Mileage, equipment, and tool reimbursement

Beyond wages and per diem there is the money you lay out that the job is supposed to give back. Mileage for driving your own vehicle on company business, a tool allowance or reimbursement for tools you are required to furnish, and equipment or rental costs you fronted. Each of these is governed by the employer policy or the CBA, and each is a line that gets dropped when nobody logs it.

Mileage is the one with the cleanest reference. Many employers reimburse driving at the IRS standard mileage rate, which the IRS sets each year, though the employer policy controls whether and how much they pay. Log the date, the purpose, the start and end points, and the miles. Personal commuting usually does not count; driving between jobs or running for material usually does, but the policy decides.

Tools are where the trade gets nickel-and-dimed. If the job requires you to supply tools and the agreement says they reimburse or provide an allowance, that is real money, and a tool that walks off the job or breaks in service may be covered. Keep receipts for anything you buy for the job and note the date and what it was for. The reimbursement you cannot document is the reimbursement you will not collect.

Mob, demob, and travel pay for the traveling hand

Mobilization and demobilization, mob and demob, is the trip in to start the job and the trip home at the end, and on a traveling job that is real time and real money. Travel pay covers it, in some mix of paid travel hours, mileage or airfare, a travel-day per diem, and sometimes a flat mob and demob allowance. None of it is required by federal wage law as a blanket rule, so it lives in the employer policy or, on a union job, the CBA, which often spells out travel and subsistence in detail.

The pieces to pin down before you roll: do you get paid for the travel time, and at what rate; is the trip in and out covered or just one way; when does per diem start, the day you leave or the day you report; and what happens if the job ends early or you get sent home. Travel-day per diem is frequently paid at the partial rate, the same 75 percent first-and-last-day idea that runs through the federal per diem rules.

The traveler's mistake is treating the trip as personal time and not logging it. Log the travel day like a work day: when you left, when you arrived, the miles or the flight, and the per diem you were owed for it. On a long job with multiple trips home and back, those travel days add up to a meaningful number, and they are exactly the entries payroll is most likely to miss because no production work happened.

Union and merit shop: what changes

On a union job the CBA is the rule book, and it usually pays better and writes more of the terms than the law requires. It sets the wage by classification, the fringe package, the overtime and double-time triggers, the show-up and travel and subsistence language, the shift premiums, and the dues that come out of your check. When the CBA is richer than state or federal law, the CBA wins, and on these terms it usually is.

Merit shop, the open shop, runs on the employer's policy and the law instead of an agreement. The federal and state wage floors still apply, prevailing wage still applies on covered public work, and the per diem and travel terms are whatever the company sets. There is no contract premium structure to fall back on, so the policy is the document you read, and you read it before you take the job, not after the first short check.

Either way the move is the same: know which document governs your pay and keep a record that lets you check the pay against it. On a union job, that means knowing your classification and the fringe rate, because misclassification to a lower rate is a classic shorting. The local and its agreement are the authority on a union job. The employer handbook is the authority on a merit job. Get the actual document for the job you are on.

The record that wins a dispute

When pay or labor gets disputed, the contemporaneous record wins and the memory loses. A contemporaneous record is one made at the time the work happened, not reconstructed later, and that timing is what gives it weight. A daily log written each evening, a timesheet you signed the day you turned it in, a photo of the hours board at quitting time, a text to the foreman confirming Saturday. These line up and corroborate each other, and that is what a record that holds up looks like.

Photograph the board. On a lot of jobs the daily hours go up on a whiteboard or a tally sheet before they ever reach payroll, and a dated photo of that board at the end of the shift is some of the strongest proof there is, because it is the company's own count caught before anyone could change it. Same with a signed timesheet: keep your copy, because the one that matters in a dispute is the one signed at the time, not the clean version printed at closeout.

Keep it boring and keep it consistent. A record that exists only on the days something went wrong looks like a complaint. A record kept every single day, in the same form, looks like the truth, because it is. The worker who can produce a full season of daily entries is in a different position than the one who has a few angry notes about the weeks that got shorted.

Working in several states in one year

A traveler who works in more than one state in a year can owe income tax in more than one state, and the rules are a thicket. The general shape: the state where you physically perform the work can tax that income, and your home state taxes you as a resident, with credits and agreements meant to keep you from being taxed twice on the same dollar. Some neighboring states have reciprocity agreements that let a worker be taxed only by their home state, and there are currently such agreements among roughly sixteen states and the District of Columbia.

States also set thresholds before withholding kicks in. Some require an employer to withhold from the first day you work there; others set a threshold of days or wages, and a few sit at or beyond 30 days before withholding is required. So a short stint in one state and a long one in another can be treated very differently, and your stubs may show withholding for states you barely worked in.

This is squarely a hedge-to-the-professional topic. The reason to keep your own record of which state you worked, and how many days, is that it is the input a tax preparer needs to file correctly and to claim the credits that prevent double taxation. Log the state and the dates. Then take that log, and all your stubs, to a tax professional who handles multi-state filers, because getting this wrong costs real money in either direction and a field guide is not tax advice.

The foreman's roll-up: the gang timesheet and the daily report

A foreman tracking a crew keeps the gang timesheet, the single sheet that captures the whole crew's hours for the day by name, by cost code, and by hour type. It is the foreman's version of the worker's daily record, scaled to the gang, and it is the document payroll actually runs off of for the crew. Done right, it is the bridge between what the crew did and what the crew gets paid.

Tie it to the daily report. The daily construction report, what work happened, manpower, weather, delays, deliveries, captures the conditions, and the gang timesheet captures the hours that go with them. When the two agree, the foreman has a defensible record: the report says it rained and the crew was sent home at ten, the timesheet shows the reporting hours, and the two corroborate each other for the same day. When they disagree, somebody is going to ask why, and usually at the worst time.

The foreman's discipline that protects the whole crew is coding the gang hours to the right cost codes and keeping the change-order labor separate as it happens. Every worker on the crew depends on the foreman getting the day down accurately and on time, because the worker's own record is the backstop, but the gang timesheet is the front line. Capture it daily, keep it consistent, and reconcile it against what the crew actually reports, not against what the schedule wished they had done.

What to document

The record is only as good as what it captures, and on a traveling job the entries that get skipped are the ones that cost the most: the worked-through break, the rained-out report, the travel day, the change-order hour. Capture the same fields every day, the day it happens, so a stranger could reconstruct what you were owed. The table below is the spine of a worker's daily record.

Common mistakes

• Keeping no contemporaneous record and trying to reconstruct the hours later from memory.
• Trusting the pay stub instead of reconciling it line by line against your own log.
• Assuming per diem is non-taxable when the plan, the rate, or the distance from your tax home can make it taxable.
• Using the overtime rule from your last job in a state with different daily-OT rules.
• Logging hours without a cost code or area, so the job costing and the change-order labor cannot be defended.
• Forgetting to log the travel day, the rained-out report, and the worked-through break, the entries payroll is most likely to miss.
• Not tracking consecutive days, so a seventh-day premium slips by unnoticed.
• Raising a short check verbally instead of in writing, with no copy and no date.

Field checklist

Standards and references

The federal overtime baseline is the Fair Labor Standards Act, the FLSA, which requires time and a half for hours over 40 in a workweek and does not require daily overtime or double time. State labor law sits on top of it and is where daily overtime, double time, the seventh-day rule, and reporting time pay come from, and these vary widely by state. California is the broadest example, with daily overtime over 8 hours, double time over 12, a seventh-day rule, and reporting time pay; most states ride the federal 40-hour rule. Confirm the rule for the state the job is in, because the law of the work location governs, not the law of home.

Prevailing wage on federal and federally funded construction comes from the Davis-Bacon Act and the related acts, enforced through weekly certified payroll, commonly Form WH-347, with a statement of compliance under the Copeland Act. States have their own prevailing wage laws. Whether a given data center scope is covered depends on the funding and the contract, so check the wage determination posted for the job.

Per diem references the GSA per diem rates, published by fiscal year and by locality, and the taxability of per diem runs through IRS rules, the accountable-plan requirements in Publication 463 and the per diem revenue procedures. Mileage commonly references the IRS standard mileage rate. Multi-state income tax turns on each state's nonresident rules, reciprocity agreements, and withholding thresholds. On a union job the collective bargaining agreement, the CBA, governs the pay terms and frequently exceeds the legal minimums. None of this is legal or tax advice; the employer policy, the CBA, the applicable state law, and a tax professional control your specific situation, so verify before you rely on a number here.

Terms and acronyms

Labor pay carries its own shorthand, and the same term can read differently across a pay stub, a CBA, and a tax form. The terms below are the ones that travel across the whole record.

ST / OT / DT

Straight time, overtime at one and a half, and double time at two times the regular rate

FLSA

Fair Labor Standards Act, the federal law setting overtime at over 40 hours in a workweek

Prevailing wage

A government-set minimum wage and fringe by classification and locality for covered public or publicly funded work

Certified payroll

The weekly report, often Form WH-347, certifying each worker was paid at least the prevailing wage and fringe

Per diem

A daily allowance for being away from home, split into lodging and meals and incidental expenses

M&IE

Meals and incidental expenses, the food-and-tips portion of per diem, often paid at a partial rate on travel days

Accountable plan

An IRS-recognized reimbursement structure under which per diem and expenses stay non-taxable when properly substantiated

CBA

Collective bargaining agreement, the union contract that governs wages, fringe, overtime, and travel on a union job

Reporting time pay

Show-up pay, the minimum some states or CBAs require when you report and the work is not there

Mob / demob

Mobilization and demobilization, the trip to start the job and the trip home, and the travel pay that covers them

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