Compensable time
Compensable time is time you must count as hours worked and pay, whether or not the work was scheduled or approved in advance.
Hours worked reaches beyond the scheduled shift. A time system may need to track meal periods, rest breaks, travel, training, on-call activity, waiting time, and make-up time. Whether an activity is compensable is your policy decision under applicable law, not something a time configuration settles. Hours you suffer or permit a non-exempt employee to work are hours worked and must be recorded and paid. That includes overtime nobody approved in advance. Discipline for unapproved hours is separate from paying for them.
Which activities commonly count as hours worked?
The rest-break and meal-period rules below are federal, and state rules can be stricter. Travel that keeps an employee away overnight falls under its own set of rules. Call-back pay, typically set by agreement or practice, is minimum pay for an employee you call back after the shift ends. If the work was unforeseen, pay for guaranteed hours not worked may be excluded from the regular rate but cannot be credited toward federal overtime. Pay for work you anticipated and could have scheduled stays in the regular rate.
- Short rest breaks, commonly twenty minutes or less
- Travel between work locations during the workday
- Training, unless all four exclusion conditions apply
- Waiting time when the employee is engaged to wait
- On-call time whose constraints keep the employee from using it effectively for personal purposes
- Generally, a bona fide meal period of thirty minutes or more with the employee fully relieved of duty
- Ordinary home-to-work commuting
- Training outside working hours that is voluntary, unrelated to the job, and involves no productive work
- Waiting time when the employee is waiting to be engaged
General information, not legal or tax advice. Apply current federal and state rules with qualified guidance.