Improved technology may make it more difficult for employers to rely on rounding in timekeeping, a recent U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) wage and hour opinion letter suggests.
In FLSA 2026-8, the DOL was asked if certain pre-shift activities by hospital employees were compensable work and, if so, whether the hospital’s practice of rounding employees’ clock-in time to their scheduled shift start time was permissible.
The DOL declined to conclude the time was or wasn’t de minimis, given the large number of employees involved. “Employers, including the hospital at issue here, should nonetheless be particularly careful about how and to what extent they apply the de minimis doctrine,” the DOL said. “Particularly given the technological advances that have made it possible for employers to track employees’ work time with increasing precision, employers should expect exacting scrutiny of de minimis claims where employees perform off-the-clock work with any degree of regularity.”
The opinion letter emphasized that “timekeeping practices that used to be commonplace — such as rounding — will face increasing scrutiny as technological advances enable increasingly precise time tracking,” said Robert Pritchard, an attorney with Littler in Pittsburgh.
The DOL’s regulations provide that employers may practice time rounding, but only under specific conditions. Employers may round employee time to the nearest fraction of an hour — such as the nearest five or six minutes, or quarter hour.
“This practice, however, is only acceptable if it ‘will not result, over a period of time, in failure to compensate the employees properly for all the time they have actually worked,’ ” the opinion letter added, quoting the regulations. “This means a rounding practice must both be neutral on its face and average out over time so it does not consistently favor the employer.”
The DOL was presented with a specific set of facts and asked whether uncompensated time was de minimis, said Natalie Bare, an attorney with Greenberg Traurig in Philadelphia. “The DOL declined to reach a conclusion on the facts presented and used the opportunity to remind employers that modern electronic timekeeping systems have raised the bar for administrative difficulty arguments,” she said.
Other Recent Opinion Letters
In other recent opinion letters, the DOL found:
- The performance of additional nonexempt work at an hourly rate was insufficient to alter an employee’s exempt status under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) as long as the employee’s primary duty remained the performance of exempt work and the salary requirements continued to be met (FLSA2026-5).
- A quarterly bonus provided simultaneous payment of any overtime compensation due on the bonus, satisfying the act’s overtime requirement (FLSA2026-6).
- An employer provided a bona fide meal period even though an off-site meal may have been difficult to have in the time provided (FLSA2026-7).
Under the FLSA, an employer is not obligated to exclude from a bona fide meal period the time voluntarily spent to travel offsite to eat a meal, the opinion letter said, noting that the FLSA does not require employers to provide employees rest or meal breaks. Bona fide meal periods are not worktime. In order to be bona fide, the employee must be relieved from their duties so they can eat.
FLSA 2026-7 “represents a welcome development for employers facing meal break litigation, particularly in the healthcare and manufacturing sectors where large secured or campus-style facilities are common,” Bare said.
Plaintiffs’ lawyers have increasingly argued that walk and security screening time take so much of a 30-minute meal break that the remaining time is insufficient to constitute a bona fide meal period, effectively converting the entire break into compensable time.
“This letter directly rejects that theory,” Bare said. “For companies that provide employees a practical option to take a full 30-minute break on the premises, this letter provides significant support for the position that the meal period is noncompensable regardless of what individual employees choose to do with it.”
State laws may impose additional requirements, such as requiring employers to provide meal periods or requiring that mandatory onsite meal periods must be treated as worktime, Pritchard noted.
Employers should ensure that their meal period policies comply with applicable state law, he emphasized. “This is especially important for multistate employers, as more than 15 states have meal period laws,” Pritchard said.
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