diff --git a/sentence_transformers/SentenceTransformer.py b/sentence_transformers/SentenceTransformer.py
index a08e3fad1..c0951ba9d 100644
--- a/sentence_transformers/SentenceTransformer.py
+++ b/sentence_transformers/SentenceTransformer.py
@@ -48,6 +48,7 @@
     load_file_path,
     save_to_hub_args_decorator,
     truncate_embeddings,
+    truncate_masked_sequence,
 )
 
 logger = logging.getLogger(__name__)
@@ -560,15 +561,15 @@ def encode(
                 out_features["sentence_embedding"] = truncate_embeddings(
                     out_features["sentence_embedding"], self.truncate_dim
                 )
-
+                # Do this check because otherwise this function is always in the
+                # hot path.
+                if output_value == "token_embeddings" or output_value is None:
+                    if "token_embeddings" in out_features:
+                        out_features["token_embeddings"] = truncate_masked_sequence(
+                            out_features["token_embeddings"], out_features["attention_mask"]
+                        )
                 if output_value == "token_embeddings":
-                    embeddings = []
-                    for token_emb, attention in zip(out_features[output_value], out_features["attention_mask"]):
-                        last_mask_id = len(attention) - 1
-                        while last_mask_id > 0 and attention[last_mask_id].item() == 0:
-                            last_mask_id -= 1
-
-                        embeddings.append(token_emb[0 : last_mask_id + 1])
+                    embeddings = features["token_embeddings"]
                 elif output_value is None:  # Return all outputs
                     embeddings = []
                     for sent_idx in range(len(out_features["sentence_embedding"])):
diff --git a/sentence_transformers/util.py b/sentence_transformers/util.py
index df1a80eb2..71deb1a83 100644
--- a/sentence_transformers/util.py
+++ b/sentence_transformers/util.py
@@ -1509,3 +1509,38 @@ def disable_datasets_caching():
     finally:
         if is_originally_enabled:
             enable_caching()
+
+
+def truncate_masked_sequence(token_embeddings: torch.Tensor, attention_mask: torch.Tensor) -> list[torch.Tensor]:
+    """
+    Process a tensor to remove padding tokens.
+
+    Args:
+        token_embeddings (torch.Tensor): The token embeddings.
+        attention_mask (torch.Tensor): The attention mask.
+
+    Returns:
+        list[torch.Tensor]: The processed token embeddings. Each tensor in the list corresponds to a sequence.
+        Each tensor contains all tokens up until the first padding token in the trailing sequence of padding tokens.
+    """
+    out: list[torch.Tensor] = []
+    all_zero_mask = attention_mask == 0
+    for token_emb, zero_mask in zip(token_embeddings, all_zero_mask):
+        # Three cases:
+        # 1. No padding tokens. This happens at least once per batch
+        # unless padding is constant.
+        if not any(zero_mask):
+            out.append(token_emb)
+            continue
+        # 2. The first token is already a padding token.
+        # This should not happen, but leads to weird cases if we don't check.
+        if zero_mask[0]:
+            last_mask_id = 1
+        else:
+            # 3. The padding tokens are in the middle of the sequence.
+            # We find the first padding token and remove it and everything after it.
+            last_mask_id = zero_mask.float().argmax().item()
+
+        out.append(token_emb[:last_mask_id])
+
+    return out
diff --git a/tests/test_util.py b/tests/test_util.py
index 0cecce2bb..8586eaae5 100644
--- a/tests/test_util.py
+++ b/tests/test_util.py
@@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
 import torch
 
 from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer, util
-from sentence_transformers.util import community_detection
+from sentence_transformers.util import community_detection, truncate_masked_sequence
 
 
 def test_normalize_embeddings() -> None:
@@ -275,3 +275,28 @@ def test_community_detection_gpu_support():
     ]
     result = community_detection(embeddings, threshold=0.8, min_community_size=2)
     assert sorted([sorted(community) for community in result]) == sorted([sorted(community) for community in expected])
+
+
+def test_truncate_masked_sequence() -> None:
+    """Tests whether util.truncate_masked_sequence works correctly."""
+    input_ids = torch.tensor([[101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106], [101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106]])
+    expected = [torch.tensor([101, 102, 103, 104]), torch.tensor([101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106])]
+    attention_mask = torch.tensor([[1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0], [1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1]])
+    truncated_input_ids = truncate_masked_sequence(input_ids, attention_mask)
+    assert [torch.equal(x, y) for x, y in zip(truncated_input_ids, expected)]
+
+    old_output = _truncate_masked_sequence_old(input_ids, attention_mask)
+    assert [torch.equal(x, y) for x, y in zip(truncated_input_ids, old_output)]
+
+
+def _truncate_masked_sequence_old(token_embeddings: torch.Tensor, attention_mask: torch.Tensor) -> list[torch.Tensor]:
+    """Helper function."""
+    out: list[torch.Tensor] = []
+    for token_emb, attention in zip(token_embeddings, attention_mask):
+        last_mask_id = len(attention) - 1
+        while last_mask_id > 0 and attention[last_mask_id].item() == 0:
+            last_mask_id -= 1
+
+        out.append(token_emb[0 : last_mask_id + 1])
+
+    return out